Anton Chekhov quotes:

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man is what he believes.

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.

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

To advise is not to compel.

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

If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit."

There is nothing new in art except talent.

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

He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same."

Shabelsky: I'd go into the flames of hell, into the jaws of the crocodile, just so as not to stay here. I am bored.I've become dulled from boredom. I've got on everyone's nerves. You leave me at home so she isn't bored alone, but I've made her life hell, I've eaten her up!"

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: "My work is literature."

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious

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

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.

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

Women can't forgive failure.

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions. Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.

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.

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

"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."

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Only entropy comes easy.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

An artist's flair is sometimes worth a scientist's brains.

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.

An actress without talent, forty years old, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than the actress.

If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter

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.

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

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.

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.

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.

You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: "Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.

The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom--freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.

Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, andamong 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!

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

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...

I'm in mourning for my life.

When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life.

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

A litterateur is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer. . . . He is just like an ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter, because of his fastidiousness or from a wish to give pleasure to his readers, were to describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroad contractors.

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.

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.

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

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

Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.

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.

The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.

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.

If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

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

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

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

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

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.

Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.

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

A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.

We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding?