Top 438 Quotes & Sayings by Anton Chekhov - Page 4

The stupider the peasant, the better the horse understands him.

When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself - hence the war with what he does not understand.

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

Brevity - the sister of talent.

I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.

Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive... Everything that is unattainable for us now will one day be near and clear... But we must work.

Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.

You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.

An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.

What truth? You see where truth is, and where untruth is, but I seem to have lost my sight and see nothing. You boldly settle all important questions, but tell me, dear, isn't it because you're young, because you haven't had time to suffer till you settled a single one of your questions? You boldly look forward, isn't it because you cannot foresee or expect anything terrible, because so far life has been hidden from your young eyes? You are bolder, more honest, deeper than we are, but think only, be just a little magnanimous, and have mercy on me.

A person loves to talk about his illnesses although that is the least interesting part of his life.

When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries.

Silence accompanies the most significant expressions of happiness and unhappiness: those in love understand one another best when silent, while the most heated and impassioned speech at a graveside touches only outsiders, but seems cold and inconsequential to the widow and children of the deceased.

I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.

Life has gone by as if I never lived

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.

People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.

Write, write, write-till your fingers break.

My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of selecting the important moments from the trivial ones. . . . It's about time for writers - particularly those who are genuine artists - to recognize that in this world you cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does not understand everything, and that alone will represent a major contribution to the way people think, a long leap forward.

Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.

The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.

Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.

At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.

It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.

Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.

It's even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.

That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.

..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.

Not everyone knows how to be silent or to leave in good time. It happens that even people of good breeding fail to notice that their presence provokes in the weary or preoccupied host a feeling akin to hatred, and that this feeling is tensely concealed and covered up with lies.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

In Russia there is no philosophy, but philosophize everything, even the small fry.

I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

Let the things that happen on the stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.

Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.

In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn't yetappeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.

[In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.

I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense....

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.

A man can deceive his fiancee or his mistress as much as he likes and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher. But a daughter is a different matter.

A man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.

One must speak about serious things seriously.

Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it's unimaginable.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

He who doesn't know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others' successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs.

There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.

I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.

Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly.

It's immoral to steal, but you can take things.

Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.

It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.

Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice.... My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.