Anton Chekhov
Everyone has the same God; only people differ.Collection: God
He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.Collection: Funny
I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.Collection: Best Effort
It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.Collection: Poor
Not everyone knows how to be silent or to leave in good time. It happens that even people of good breeding fail to notice that their presence provokes in the weary or preoccupied host a feeling akin to hatred, and that this feeling is tensely concealed and covered up with lies.Collection: Lying
Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it's unimaginable.Collection: So Sad
I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense....Collection: Determination
I've noticed that people who get married cease to be curious.Collection: Marriage
Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher's stone.Collection: Thinking
That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.Collection: Can Not
The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issuesnot from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.Collection: Soul
A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.Collection: Art
To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.Collection: Passion
Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems" come fromsuch 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.Collection: Running
People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.Collection: People
When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself - hence the war with what he does not understand.Collection: War
Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.Collection: Years
A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.Collection: Writing
In Russia there is no philosophy, but philosophize everything, even the small fry.Collection: Philosophy
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.Collection: Spring
It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.Collection: Sister
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.Collection: Freedom
Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one's eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.Collection: Happiness
I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.Collection: Girl
There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.Collection: Beautiful
In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won"t be there to see it - but it"s why we live, why we work. It"s why we suffer. We"re creating it. That"s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.Collection: Two
An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.Collection: Wall
Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly.Collection: Years
Write only of what is important and eternal.Collection: Writing
And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.Collection: Firsts
One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.Collection: Creative
My mistress has come home; at last I've seen her. Now I'm ready to die.Collection: Home
Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.Collection: Should
Let the things that happen on the stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.Collection: Simple
What truth? You see where truth is, and where untruth is, but I seem to have lost my sight and see nothing. You boldly settle all important questions, but tell me, dear, isn't it because you're young, because you haven't had time to suffer till you settled a single one of your questions? You boldly look forward, isn't it because you cannot foresee or expect anything terrible, because so far life has been hidden from your young eyes? You are bolder, more honest, deeper than we are, but think only, be just a little magnanimous, and have mercy on me.Collection: Eye
My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of selecting the important moments from the trivial ones. . . . It's about time for writers - particularly those who are genuine artists - to recognize that in this world you cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does not understand everything, and that alone will represent a major contribution to the way people think, a long leap forward.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Each Day
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!Collection: Character
Love is a scandal of the personal sort.Collection: Love
By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.Collection: People
My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom--freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.Collection: Inspiration
Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.Collection: Time
Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let's have a philosophical conversation.Collection: Philosophical
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.Collection: Integrity
These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.Collection: Teacher
Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive... Everything that is unattainable for us now will one day be near and clear... But we must work.Collection: Men
There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments , but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.Collection: Disappointment
Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.Collection: Liars
When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.Collection: Grace