Anton Chekhov Life Quotations

If one wants to lead a good life, A HUMAN LIFE, one must work.

You look boldly ahead; isn't it only that you don't see or divine anything terrible in the future; because life is still hidden from your young eyes.

Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.

Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!

"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.

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.

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

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.

I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.

Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.

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

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

If only we could go back to Moscow! Sell the house, finish with our life here, and go back to Moscow.