Anton Chekhov Quotes

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

To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!

Brevity - the sister of talent.

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

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—

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.

There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.

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

To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face

Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.

I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.

My holy of holies is the human body.

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

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

To advise is not to compel.

If you fear loneliness, then don't get married.

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy...

Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.

There isn't a Monday that would not cede its place to Tuesday.

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

A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.

Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems" come fromsuch goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.

Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something.

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

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

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

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.

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

You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.

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.

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

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 teacher must be an actor, an artist,passionately in love with his work.

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.

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!

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

For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.

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. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples' character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe. ... What a terrible future!

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

The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.

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

And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!

In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn't yetappeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.

People should be beautiful in every way - in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given.