Top 438 Quotes & Sayings by Anton Chekhov - Page 3

Everyone has the same God; only people differ.

Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read - my own or other people's works - it all seems to me not short enough.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.

There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Women can't forgive failure.

If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.

If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom--there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am lost, I am lost; there is no doubt of that.

A tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life.

Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.

To regard one's immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.

Only one who loves can remember so well.

Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport.

There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you're angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you're asked.

I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, won't in my sky every day...

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.

You ask me what life is. That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know.

I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.

The teacher must be an actor, an artist,passionately in love with his work.

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.

Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.

It's very hard, feeling that you're no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.

But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life!

In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.

Love, respect, and friendship do unite a people as well as a common hatred does.

I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.

What a delight it is to respect people!

You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.

The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.

There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy...

Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.

The more cultured a man, the less fortunate he is.

Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.

In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won"t be there to see it - but it"s why we live, why we work. It"s why we suffer. We"re creating it. That"s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.

What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won't seem important at all.

Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom--freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.

Write only of what is important and eternal.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.

I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.

The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.

If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.

All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: 'Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!'

When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.

In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will... Each hour is precious.

Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one.