Anton Chekhov quotes - page 4

I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious. (Anton Chekhov)
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Anton Chekhov
When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.
Anton Chekhov
My mother and father are the only people on the whole planet for whom I will never begrudge a thing. Should I achieve great things, it is the work of their hands; they are splendid people and their absolute love of their children places them above the highest praise. It cloaks all of their shortcomings, shortcomings that may have resulted from a difficult life.
Anton Chekhov
Everyone has the same God; only people differ.
Anton Chekhov
Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport.
Anton Chekhov
Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.
Anton Chekhov
Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.
Anton Chekhov
Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
Anton Chekhov
There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.
Anton Chekhov
At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people. (Anton Chekhov)
There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.
Anton Chekhov
I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.
Anton Chekhov
When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries.
Anton Chekhov
One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
Anton Chekhov
Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.
Anton Chekhov
Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
Anton Chekhov
Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
Anton Chekhov
Silence accompanies the most significant expressions of happiness and unhappiness: those in love understand one another best when silent, while the most heated and impassioned speech at a graveside touches only outsiders, but seems cold and inconsequential to the widow and children of the deceased.
Anton Chekhov
No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
Anton Chekhov
I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles. (Anton Chekhov)
An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.
Anton Chekhov
That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
Anton Chekhov
I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.
Anton Chekhov
Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.
Anton Chekhov