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
Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.
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.
Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.
You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly.
Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
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.
All the great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ignorant and as indelicate as generals, because they feel secure of impunity.
The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: “Nothing passes away.” I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
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.
What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.
Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.
Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.
To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
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.
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.
The Most Inspiring Anton Chekhov Quotes
My love is like a stone tied round my neck; it’s dragging me down to the bottom; but I love my stone. I can’t live without it.
A grimy fly can soil the entire wall and a small, dirty little act can ruin the entire proceedings.
Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general senseand the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reasons lie not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.
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.
When you’re thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that’s faith; when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that’s science.
A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.
In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.
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.
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.
I have the feeling that I’ve seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.
There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments, but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.
Even while lying, you’ll be believed if you speak with authority.
If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.
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.
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.
A woman can become a man’s friend only in the following stages – first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.
When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.
I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.
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.
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.
I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.
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.
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.
If you cry “Forward” you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?
God’s world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!
One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.
Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there’s an unfinished novel waiting for me.
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.
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.
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given.
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.”
Only those young people can be accepted as healthy who refuse to be reconciled with the old order and foolishly or wisely struggle against it – such is the will of nature…