Anton Chekhov Quotes

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

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.

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.

Only one who loves can remember so well.

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

I've noticed that people who get married cease to be curious.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.

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

A tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.

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

If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.

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

The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.

The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

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

What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country; the people have no morals; and the boredom!

It is as acceptable now to love the wives of others as it is to smoke their cigars and read their books.

It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.

Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.

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

It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.

I'm the seagull. No, that's not it. I'm an actress. That's it.

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.

Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.

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

When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.

Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.

When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder - that seems to give a kind of background to another's grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. ... The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make.

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.

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

I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.

Man is what he believes.

The snow has not yet left the earth but spring is already asking to enter your heart.

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.

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.

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

One must speak about serious things seriously.

I often wonder: suppose we could begin life over again, knowing what we were doing? Suppose we could use one life, already ended, as a sort of rough draft for another? I think that every one of us would try, more than anything else, not to repeat himself, at the very least he would rearrange his manner of life, he would make sure of rooms like these, with flowers and light ... I have a wife and two daughters, my wife's health is delicate and so on and so on, and if I had to begin life all over again I would not marry. ... No, no!

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