Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904)
(Old Style: 17 January 1860 – 2 July 1904) was a major Russian short story writer and playwright.
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.
He who constantly swims in the ocean loves dry land.
I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.
In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, 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.
It’s immoral to steal, but you can take things.
Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.
Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?
Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.
In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength.
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.
In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.
Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write.
The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.
There is no Monday which will not give its place to Tuesday.
If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.
It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution.
Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one’s dignity.
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.