Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

Eyes—the head’s chief of police. They watch and make mental notes. A blind person is like a city abandoned by the authorities. On sad days they cry. In these carefree times they weep only from tender emotions.

— Anton Chekhov

We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.

— Anton Chekhov

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.

— Anton Chekhov

If only one tooth aches, rejoice that not all of them ache.... If your wife betrays you, be glad that she betrayed only you and not the nation.

— Anton Chekhov

Love is a scandal of the personal sort.

— Anton Chekhov

Once you’ve married, be strict but just with your wife, don’t allow her to forget herself, and when a misunderstanding arises, say: “Don’t forget that I made you happy.”

— Anton Chekhov

By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.

— Anton Chekhov

Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.

— Anton Chekhov

I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it’s tobacco, then let it be tobacco.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.

— Anton Chekhov

Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a lie.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

The sea has neither meaning nor pity.

— Anton Chekhov

Everyone has the same God; only people differ.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.

— Anton Chekhov

Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.

— Anton Chekhov

Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.

— Anton Chekhov

By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress.

— Anton Chekhov

Good breeding doesn't mean that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice when someone else does.

— Anton Chekhov

It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others’ expense.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Who keeps the tavern and serves up the drinks? The peasant. Who squanders and drinks up money belonging to the peasant commune, the school, the church? The peasant. Who would steal from his neighbor, commit arson, and falsely denounce another for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.

— Anton Chekhov

While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.

— Anton Chekhov

It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don’t just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.

— Anton Chekhov

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?

— Anton Chekhov

You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

— Anton Chekhov

Between "there is a God" and "there is no God" lies a whole vast tract, which the really wise man crosses with great effort. A Russian knows one or other of these two extremes, and the middle tract between them does not interest him; and therefore he usually knows nothing, or very little. (Diary, 1897)

— Anton Chekhov

Dinner at the "Continental" to commemorate the great reform [the abolition of the serfdom in 1861]. Tedious and incongruous. To dine, drink champagne, make a racket, and deliver speeches about national consciousness, the conscience of the people, freedom, and such things, while slaves in tail-coats are running round your tables, veritable serfs, and your coachmen wait outside in the street, in the bitter cold—that is lying to the Holy Ghost. (Diary, 9 February 1897)

— Anton Chekhov

Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

— Anton Chekhov

The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.

— Anton Chekhov

Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.

— Anton Chekhov

Ordinary hypocrites pretend to be doves; political and literary hypocrites pretend to be eagles. But don't be disconcerted by their aquiline appearance. They are not eagles, but rats or dogs.

— Anton Chekhov

It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

A nice man would feel ashamed even before a dog.

— Anton Chekhov

There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

— Anton Chekhov

How pleasant it is to respect people! When I see books, I am not concerned with how the authors loved or played cards; I see only their marvelous works.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.

— Anton Chekhov

The more refined the more unhappy.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most uninteresting things in their lives.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.

— Anton Chekhov

They say: "In the long run truth will triumph;" but it is untrue.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.

— Anton Chekhov

If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.

— Anton Chekhov

There is nothing new in art except talent.

— Anton Chekhov

Although you may tell lies, people will believe you, if only you speak with authority.

— Anton Chekhov

As I shall lie in the grave alone, so in fact I live alone.

— Anton Chekhov

Our self-esteem and conceit are European, but our culture and actions are Asiatic.

— Anton Chekhov

Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.

— Anton Chekhov

How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.

— Anton Chekhov

When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean—that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses—that is science.

— Anton Chekhov

If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.

— Anton Chekhov

We fret ourselves to reform life, in order that posterity may be happy, and posterity will say as usual: "In the past it used to be better, the present is worse than the past."

— Anton Chekhov

Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.

— Anton Chekhov

There is not a single criterion which can serve as the measure of the non-existent, of the non-human.

— Anton Chekhov

And I thought that were we now to obtain political liberty, of which we talk so much, while engaged in biting one another, we should not know what to do with it, we should waste it in accusing one another in the newspapers of being spies and money-grubbers, we should frighten society with the assurance that we have neither men, nor science, nor literature, nothing! Nothing!

— Anton Chekhov

It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution.

— Anton Chekhov

There is no Monday which will not give its place to Tuesday.

— Anton Chekhov

My mother and father are the only people on the whole planet for whom I will never begrudge a thing. Should I achieve great things, it is the work of their hands; they are splendid people and their absolute love of their children places them above the highest praise. It cloaks all of their shortcomings, shortcomings that may have resulted from a difficult life.

— Anton Chekhov

Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one’s dignity.

— Anton Chekhov

A grimy fly can soil the entire wall and a small, dirty little act can ruin the entire proceedings.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.

— Anton Chekhov

When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, life consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.

— Anton Chekhov

Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.

— Anton Chekhov

I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.

— Anton Chekhov

Writers are as jealous as pigeons.

— Anton Chekhov

In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn’t the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.

— Anton Chekhov

Happiness does not await us all. One needn’t be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.

— Anton Chekhov

One must speak about serious things seriously.

— Anton Chekhov

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.

— Anton Chekhov

I don’t know why one can’t chase two rabbits at the same time, even in the literal sense of those words. If you have the hounds, go ahead and pursue.

— Anton Chekhov

The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.

— Anton Chekhov

I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.

— Anton Chekhov

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe.... What a terrible future!

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes.

— Anton Chekhov

It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.

— Anton Chekhov

You are right to demand that an artist engage his work consciously, but you confuse two different things: solving the problem and correctly posing the question.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels.... They must not be turned into a plaything of one’s mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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 hard and tortuous to write a bad one.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.

— Anton Chekhov

In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.

— Anton Chekhov

There is nothing new in art except talent.

— Anton Chekhov

There are no lower or higher or median moralities. There is only one morality, and it is precisely the one that was given to us during the time of Jesus Christ and that stops me, you and Barantsevich from stealing, offending others, lying etc.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

One can only call that youth healthful which refuses to be reconciled to old ways and which, foolishly or shrewdly, combats the old. This is nature’s charge and all progress hinges upon it.

— Anton Chekhov

The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.

— Anton Chekhov

He who constantly swims in the ocean loves dry land.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

When we retreat to the country, we are hiding not from people, but from our pride, which, in the city and among people, operates unfairly and immoderately.

— Anton Chekhov

People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.

— Anton Chekhov

Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.

— Anton Chekhov

The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.

— Anton Chekhov

The person who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing can never be an artist.

— Anton Chekhov

Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such 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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.

— Anton Chekhov

The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.

— Anton Chekhov

I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.

— Anton Chekhov

I can’t accept “our nervous age,” since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.

— Anton Chekhov

Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.

— Anton Chekhov

By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. ... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

It’s worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.

— Anton Chekhov

Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be.

— Anton Chekhov

When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

You ask “What is life?” That is the same as asking “What is a carrot?” A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

When a person hasn’t in him that which is higher and stronger than all external influences, it is enough for him to catch a good cold in order to lose his equilibrium and begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog’s bark in every sound.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It’s better to live somehow than not at all.

— Anton Chekhov

Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?

— Anton Chekhov

The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to.

— Anton Chekhov

I’m in mourning for my life.

— Anton Chekhov

Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.

— Anton Chekhov

I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say, and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy.

— Anton Chekhov

Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.

— Anton Chekhov

It’s not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.

— Anton Chekhov

People should be beautiful in every way—in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts and in their innermost selves.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.

— Anton Chekhov

Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

A woman can only become a man’s friend in three stages: first, she’s an agreeable acquaintance, then a mistress, and only after that a friend.

— Anton Chekhov

Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make?

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Grigory Petrovitch, let us weep, let us weep with joy!" he said in a thin voice, and then at once burst out laughing in a loud bass guffaw. "Ho-ho-ho! This is a fine daughter-in-law for you too! Everything is in its place in her; all runs smoothly, no creaking, the mechanism works well, lots of screws in it.

— Anton Chekhov

Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.

— Anton Chekhov

Yes, that's how it is, child. He who works, he who is patient is the superior.

— Anton Chekhov

Why did you marry me into this family, mother?" said Lipa."One has to be married, daughter. It was not us who ordained it.

— Anton Chekhov

Why do I love him so much, mamma? Why do I feel so sorry for him?" she went on in a quivering voice, and her eyes glistened with tears. "Who is he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb, but I love him; I love him like a real person. Here he can do nothing, he can't talk, and yet I know what he wants with his little eyes.

— Anton Chekhov

In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, 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.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Anton Chekhov

Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

To a heart transformed by love, it is a mandolin.

— Anton Chekhov

All Russia is our orchard.

— Anton Chekhov

The cherry orchard is now mine!... I bought the estate on which my grandfather and father were slaves, where they were not even permitted in the kitchen.

— Anton Chekhov