Top 100 Quotes About Anton Chekhov
#2. She is far above the crowd! He, he, he ... and she doesn't reckon us as human beings.
Anton Chekhov
#3. A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!
Anton Chekhov
#4. What's the point? To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man.
Anton Chekhov
#5. If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.
Anton Chekhov
#6. An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.
Anton Chekhov
#7. 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
#8. The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.
Anton Chekhov
#9. So far only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: 'This is a great mystery.
Anton Chekhov
#10. Everyone has the same God; only people differ.
Anton Chekhov
#11. Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can.
Anton Chekhov
#12. In all my life I never met anyone so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike. I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold and you don't seem to understand what I say.
Anton Chekhov
#13. You are confusing two notions, "the solution of a problem" and "the correct posing of the question". Only the second is essential for the artist.
Anton Chekhov
#14. The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.
Anton Chekhov
#15. They say we fear only what we don't understand. And, indeed, it's very hard to understand why doormen and ushers are so important, so arrogant, and so majestically impolite. When I read serious articles I feel exactly the same vague fear.
Anton Chekhov
#16. The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
Anton Chekhov
#17. civilization has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty.
Anton Chekhov
#18. In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people. I
Anton Chekhov
#20. Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with her hand.
Anton Chekhov
#21. The phlegamtic female is a weepy, bug-eyed, fat, lumpy, fleshy German. She looks like a sack of flour. She is born in order to become a mother-in-law. That is her whole ambition.
Anton Chekhov
#22. Never bring a cannon on stage in Act I unless you intend to fire it by the last act.
Anton Chekhov
#23. To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!
Anton Chekhov
#24. It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn't understand.
Anton Chekhov
#26. 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
#28. 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.
Anton Chekhov
#29. Ivanov: Gentlemen, you've again set up a drinking shop in my study ... I have asked each and every one of you a
thousand times not to do that ...
Look now, you've spilt vodka on a paper ... and there are crumbs ... and gherkins ...
It's disgusting!
Anton Chekhov
#30. Having sex is easy," he ocntinued. "All you need to do is undress the woman. But it's what comes afterwards that's such a drag; such a load of nonsense!
Anton Chekhov
#31. 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
#32. 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.
Anton Chekhov
#33. The chance you give the wrong guy who is run across with you at the right time, unless you don't give a chance the right guy who is run across with you at the wrong time, only you will always be upset
Anton Chekhov
#34. 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
#35. Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport.
Anton Chekhov
#36. 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
#37. The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.
Anton Chekhov
#38. My friend, healthy and normal people are only the common herd.
Anton Chekhov
#39. One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions,
Anton Chekhov
#40. To live simply to die is by no means amusing, but to live with the knowledge that you will die before your time, that's really is idiotic
Anton Chekhov
#41. When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.
Sarah Ruhl
#42. Any idiot can face a crisis, it is day to day living that wears you out. - Anton Chekhov
Anonymous
#43. 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.
Anton Chekhov
#44. Free and profound thought, which strives towards the comprehension of life, and a complete scorn for the foolish vanity of the world - man has never known anything higher than these two blessings.
Anton Chekhov
#45. Nobody asks her not to understand! It's a lesson for these foreigners!
Anton Chekhov
#46. Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience.
Anton Chekhov
#47. And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country.
Anton Chekhov
#48. In spite of his clumsiness and rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and goodness of heart, always ready to be of use.
Anton Chekhov
#49. A certain percentage, they tell us, must every year go... that way... to the devil, I suppose, so that the rest may remain chaste, and not be interfered with.
Anton Chekhov
#50. One hundred years from now, the people who come after us, for whom our lives are showing the way
will they think of us kindly? Will they remember us with a kind word? I wish to God I could think so.
Anton Chekhov
#51. 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
#54. When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.
Anton Chekhov
#55. I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.
Anton Chekhov
#56. Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.
Anton Chekhov
#57. 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.
Anton Chekhov
#58. I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.
Anton Chekhov
#59. You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.
Anton Chekhov
#60. You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.
Anton Chekhov
#61. You don't believe in your right to it; and here now you can't sleep.
Anton Chekhov
#62. Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
Anton Chekhov
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Anton Chekhov
#65. The sufferings which may be observed nowadays - they are so widespread and so vast - but people speak nevertheless about a certain moral improvement which society has achieved ...
Anton Chekhov
#67. 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
#68. But then there's loneliness. However you might philosophise about it, loneliness is a terrible thing, my dear fellow ... Although in reality, of course, it's absolutely of no importance!
Anton Chekhov
#69. TRIGORIN
Why do I hear a note of sadness that wrings my heart in this cry of a pure soul? If at any time you should have need of my life, come and take it.
Anton Chekhov
#70. Being in love shows a person how he ought to be.
Anton Chekhov
#71. It is as acceptable now to love the wives of others as it is to smoke their cigars and read their books.
Anton Chekhov
#72. The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.
Anton Chekhov
#73. To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face
Anton Chekhov
#75. Anna Petrovna: I am beginning to think, doctor, that fate has cheated me. The majority of people, who maybe are no better than I am, are happy and pay nothing for that happiness. I have paid for everything, absolutely everything! And how dearly! Why have I paid such terrible interest?
Anton Chekhov
#77. One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.
Anton Chekhov
#78. 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.
Anton Chekhov
#79. Hundreds of versts of desolate, monotonous, sun-parched steppe cannot bring on the depression induced by one man who sits and talks, and gives no sign of ever going.
Anton Chekhov
#80. I've noticed that people who get married cease to be curious.
Anton Chekhov
#81. Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imageryYou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.
Anton Chekhov
#82. And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!
Anton Chekhov
#83. Lizaveta was a dwarfish creature, "not five foot within a wee bit,
Anton Chekhov
#84. 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
#85. What she can't get into her narrow mind is that we're above such things as love. Our whole aim - the whole sense of our life - is to avoid petty illusions that stop us being free and happy. On, on, on!
Anton Chekhov
#86. If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
Anton Chekhov
#87. 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
#88. Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.
Anton Chekhov
#89. All saints have past and all sinners have a future.
Anton Chekhov
#90. However you feed a wolf she will always look toward the forest
Anton Chekhov
#91. Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.
Anton Chekhov
#92. 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.
Anton Chekhov
#93. That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
Anton Chekhov
#94. Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.
Anton Chekhov
#95. 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
#96. The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
Anton Chekhov
#97. Try to reason about love, and you will lose your reason.
Anton Chekhov
#99. Borkin: Ladies and gentlemen, why are you so glum? Sitting there like a jury after it's been sworn in! ... Let's think up something. What would you like? Forfeits, tug of war, catch, dancing, fireworks?
Anton Chekhov
#100. If you want women to love you, then don't be cross in front of them and don't go all pompous ... -Anna Petrovna in Ivanov
Anton Chekhov
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