Anton Chekhov Quotations

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

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

No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.

When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.

A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.

No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.

When you're thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that's faith; when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that's science.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.

Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.

Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.

We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.

People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.

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

The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.

The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.

Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

The only difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too.

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.

A fiance is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.

It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.

When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.

Never bring a cannon on stage in Act I unless you intend to fire it by the last act.

When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.

He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.

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.

Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.

To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.

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

If you fear loneliness, then don't get married.

We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of.

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.

Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems" come fromsuch goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.

It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.

Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general senseand the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reasons lie not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.

I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.

If you can't distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn't undertake philanthropic work.

To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.

The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.

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

Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.

Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far asblather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.

Love is a scandal of the personal sort.

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.

I don't care for success. The ideas sitting in my head are annoyed by, and envious of, that which I've already written.

I have in my head a whole army of people pleading to be let out and awaiting my commands.

I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

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

There are in life such confluences of circumstances that render the reproach that we are not Voltaires most inopportune.

Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields.

Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure.

Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else's opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.

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.

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.

Solomon made a big mistake when he asked for wisdom.

In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger -- a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...

One must speak about serious things seriously.

Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.

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

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll beproving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.

Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something.

To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!

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

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.

The bourgeoisie loves so-called "positive" types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one's innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.

It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.

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.

Instructing in cures, therapists always recommend that "each case be individualized." If this advice is followed, one becomes persuaded that those means recommended in textbooks as the best, means perfectly appropriate for the template case, turn out to be completely unsuitable in individual cases.

Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty.

Eyes - the head's chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.

Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double-bass, and a fly settles on his flanks and tickles and buzzes. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: 'Look, I too am living on the earth. See, I can buzz, too, buzz about anything.'

I often wonder: suppose we could begin life over again, knowing what we were doing? Suppose we could use one life, already ended, as a sort of rough draft for another? I think that every one of us would try, more than anything else, not to repeat himself, at the very least he would rearrange his manner of life, he would make sure of rooms like these, with flowers and light ... I have a wife and two daughters, my wife's health is delicate and so on and so on, and if I had to begin life all over again I would not marry. ... No, no!

If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.

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

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure

To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face

Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.

Life has gone by as if I never lived