Anton Chekhov
292 quotes
Biography
"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."
"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
"Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something."
"There is nothing new in art except talent."
"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."
"Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning."
"A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend."
"There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality."
"Even in Siberia there is happiness."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death."
"Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions."(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)"
"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."
"And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life."
"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."
"In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!"(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)"
"Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done."
"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."
"That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be."
"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."
"We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating."
"Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf."