Anton Chekhov
What a delight it is to respect people!Collection: Respect
All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: 'Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!'Collection: Long
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.Collection: Lying
The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.Collection: Fiction
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Wish
[In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.Collection: Death
Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Broken
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.Collection: Exercise
I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student.Collection: Thinking
You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.Collection: Horse
After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Thinking
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.Collection: Wall
The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.Collection: People
They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.Collection: Wise
Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.Collection: Men
The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.Collection: People
I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.Collection: Horse
There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you're angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you're asked.Collection: Integrity
An artist's flair is sometimes worth a scientist's brains.Collection: Artist
Even in Siberia there is happiness.Collection: Siberia
A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.Collection: Sweet
He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.Collection: Writing
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions. Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.Collection: Hero
Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.Collection: Hurricanes
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.Collection: Two
Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Beautiful
Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.Collection: Clever
If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.Collection: Needs
I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Lying
I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.Collection: Heart
Write, write, write-till your fingers break.Collection: Writing
Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read - my own or other people's works - it all seems to me not short enough.Collection: People
Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.Collection: Morning
In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.Collection: Character
If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom--there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am lost, I am lost; there is no doubt of that.Collection: Writing
In my head there is a whole army of people asking to be let out and waiting for the word of command.Collection: Army
To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.Collection: Lying
When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.Collection: Death
Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.Collection: Years
Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.Collection: Ideas
But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: "My work is literature."Collection: Work
In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.Collection: Dog
Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.Collection: Nature
Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.Collection: Escaping