Anton Chekhov quotes - page 7

Happiness does not await us all. One needn't be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another. (Anton Chekhov)
It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don't just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness. View quote
Anton Chekhov
There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue. View quote
Anton Chekhov
It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it. View quote
Anton Chekhov
Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom. View quote
Anton Chekhov
In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust.... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will.... Each hour is precious. View quote
Anton Chekhov
I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities. View quote
Anton Chekhov
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. View quote
Anton Chekhov
If only one tooth aches, rejoice that not all of them ache.... If your wife betrays you, be glad that she betrayed only you and not the nation. View quote
Anton Chekhov
What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won't seem important at all. View quote
Anton Chekhov
It's not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul. (Anton Chekhov)
The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing. View quote
Anton Chekhov
The air of one's native country is the most healthy air. View quote
Anton Chekhov
Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material. View quote
Anton Chekhov
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. View quote
Anton Chekhov
To regard one's immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth. View quote
Anton Chekhov
I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it's tobacco, then let it be tobacco. View quote
Anton Chekhov
It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth. View quote
Anton Chekhov
I can't accept "our nervous age,” since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell. View quote
Anton Chekhov
Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people. View quote
Anton Chekhov
Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems” come from such 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. (Anton Chekhov)
In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish-that is their strength. View quote
Anton Chekhov
There are in life such confluences of circumstances that render the reproach that we are not Voltaires most inopportune. View quote
Anton Chekhov
Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and tortuous to write a bad one. View quote
Anton Chekhov
While you're playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave. View quote
Anton Chekhov