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.Collection: Stupid
It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.Collection: Maids
Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.Collection: Creativity
Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.Collection: Angry
I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?Collection: Lilies
From here, far away, people seem very good, and that is natural, for in going away into the country we are not hiding from people but from our vanity, which in town among people is unjust and active beyond measure.Collection: Country
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.Collection: People
Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.Collection: Hypocrisy
Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.Collection: People
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.Collection: Running
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.Collection: Wall
Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else's opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.Collection: Memories
I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Nature
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!Collection: Humility
Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood!Collection: Sweet
I'm the seagull. No, that's not it. I'm an actress. That's it.Collection: Actresses
Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.Collection: Cities
It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others' expense.Collection: Psychics
You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.Collection: Taken
Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.Collection: Money
I am dying. I haven't drunk champagne for a long time.Collection: Time
Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.Collection: Real
He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Love
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.Collection: Art
Indeed, in Russia there is a terrible poverty of facts, and a terrible abundance of reflections of all sorts.Collection: Russia
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.Collection: Life
The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.Collection: Change
My holy of holies is the human body.Collection: Body
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.Collection: Art
Our pride and self-importance are European, while our development and actions are Asiatic.Collection: Pride
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!Collection: Beautiful
Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.Collection: Summer
Writers are as jealous as pigeons.Collection: Jealous
If you can't distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn't undertake philanthropic work.Collection: Dog
It is as acceptable now to love the wives of others as it is to smoke their cigars and read their books.Collection: Book
There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.Collection: Happiness
Eyes - the head's chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.Collection: Eye
In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.Collection: Writing
Only one who loves can remember so well.Collection: Remember
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.Collection: Wall
Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.Collection: Afterlife
If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.Collection: Thinking
One must speak about serious things seriously.Collection: Ideas
The air of one's native country is the most healthy air.Collection: Country
But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life!Collection: Laughter