Anton Chekhov Quotes

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!

Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system. Raskolnikov

MASHA: Isn't there some meaning?
TOOZENBACH: Meaning? ... Look out there, it's snowing. What's the meaning of that?

astonished-looking eyes.

The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.

King David had a ring with an inscription on it: 'All things pass.' When one is sad those words make one cheerful, and when one is cheerful it makes one sad. I have got myself a ring like that with Hebrew letters on it, and this talisman keeps me from infatuations. All things pass, life will pass, one wants nothing. Or at least one wants nothing but the sense of freedom, for when anyone is free, he wants nothing, nothing, nothing.

And if any of our dear ones die, it must be because it is the will of God, so we ought have fortitude and bear it submissively.

Idea for a short story. The shore of a lake, a young girl who's spent her whole life beside it, a girl like you She loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.

Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep.

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

People's destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring - they're all alike, and they're all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you - you're one in a million. You're happy -

He is barefooted.

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.

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.

Writers are as jealous as pigeons.

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.

If there's a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must fire the gun by act three, scene two. If you fire a gun in act three, scene two, you must see the gun on the wall in act one, scene one.

It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man.

There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.
(The Mill)

therefore the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes treated with derision.

Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.

My thoughts about human happiness, for some peculiar reason, had always been tinged with a certain sadness.

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

To be in continual ecstasies over nature shows poverty of imagination. In comparison with what my imagination can give me, all these streams and rocks are trash, and nothing else.

Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

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

Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write and would write with great pleasureEither I am a fool and a self-conceited person, or I am a being capable of becoming a good writer; I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me-whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions.

Lebedev: France has a clear and defined policy ... The French know what they want. They just want to wipe out the Krauts, finish, but Germany, my friend, is playing a very different tune. Germany has many more birds in her sights than just France ...
Shabelsky: Nonsense! ... In my view the German are cowards and the French are cowards ... They're just thumbing their noses at each other. Believe me, things will stop there. They won't fight.
Borkin: And as I see it, why fight? What's the point of these
armaments, congresses, expenditures? You know what I'd do? I'd gather together dogs from all over the country, give them a good dose of rabies and let them loose in enemy country. In a month all my enemies would be running rabid.

The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.

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.

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

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

It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.

Terenty comes to them, makes the sign of the cross over them, and puts bread under their heads. And no one sees his love. It is seen only by the moon which floats in the sky and peeps caressingly through the holes in the wall of the deserted barn."
from "A Day in the Country

Brevity is the sister of talent.

The Tartar looked at the sky. The stars were as many as at home, there was the same blackness around, but something was missing. At home, in Simbirsk province, the stars were not like that at all, nor was the sky.

I look upon labels and tags as prejudices. 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.

My holy of holies are the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom - freedom from force and falsity, in whatever form these last may be expressed. This is the program I would maintain, were I a great artist.

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

There is nothing good in this world that does not have some filth in its origin.

There was little sign of culture, and the luxury was senseless and haphazard, and was as ill fitting as that uniform. The floors irritated him with their brilliant polish, the lustres on the chandelier irritated him, and he was reminded for some reason of the story of the merchant who used to go to the baths with a medal on his neck ...

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

However you feed a wolf she will always look toward the forest

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.

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

Though what is 'Romeo and Juliet' after all?" he added after a short pause. "The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses under which they try to hide its rottenness. Romeo is just the same sort of animal as all the rest of us.

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.

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.

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.

Jews have sprung up and are amassing money,

She was fond of her comfort.

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 .

civilization has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty.

He did nothing and knew how to do nothing. He

I say political economy; you say - worse. I say socialism: worse. Education: worse.

I went to the Hotel of the Violet Hippopotamus and drank five glasses of good wine.

Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.

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

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

I still lack a political, religious, and philosophical world view. I change it every month, so I'll have to limit myself to the description of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist ... Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has neither.

Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it's unimaginable.

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.

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

MASHA : Happiness does not depend on riches; poor men are often happy.

I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines.

I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.

You refer me to the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect, but is there order or natural law in that I, a living, thinking creature, should stand by a ditch until it fills up, or is narrowed, when I could jump it or throw a bridge over it? Tell me, I say, why should we wait? Wait, when we have no strength to live, and yet must live and are full of the desire to live!

I have the feeling that I've seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.

You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years ... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away ... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.

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

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.

How does Chekhov's artistic "programme" comment on the message of The Duel, and vice versa? I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms ... Pharisaism, stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants' houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation ... That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom - freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.*

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

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

A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.

The theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane.

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.

The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up ... It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work ... I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.

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

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.

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.

God's earth is good. It is only we who are bad. How little justice and humility we have, how poor our understanding of patriotism! ... Instead of knowledge, there is insolence and boundless conceit, instead of labor, idleness and caddishness; there is no justice, the understanding of honor does not go beyond "the honor of the uniform," a uniform usually adorning our prisoners' dock. We must work, the hell with everything else. The important thing is that we must be just, and all the rest will be added unto us.

You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist.

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

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.

contemptuous cough

MASHA. Just think, I am already beginning to forget her face. People will not remember us either. They will forget.
VERSHININ. Yes. They will forget. That is our fate, you can't do anything about it. The things which to us seem serious, significant, very important, - the time will come - they will be forgotten or they will seem of no consequence.

The boy sang in a shrill high descant and seemed to be trying not to sing in tune.

Warmly and impulsively he put his arms round her and covered her knees and hands with kisses. Then when she muttered something and shuddered with the thought of the past, he stroked her hair, and looking into her face, realised that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near and dear to him, whom no one could replace. When he went out of the house and got into the carriage he wanted to return home alive.

Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying
yet in all the houses and on the streets there is peace and quiet; of the fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one who would cry out, who would vent his indignation aloud. We see the people who go to market, eat by day, sleep by night, who babble nonsense, marry, grow old, good-naturedly drag their feet to the cemetery, but we do not see or hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest.

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.

Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.

True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know.

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.

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.

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.