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Anton Chekhov Quotes

Anton Chekhov quote from classy quote

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.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Beauty Earth Heaven Life Reason Truth Understand Wisdom

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Illision Truth

Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Anton Chekhov Books Education Learning Wisdom

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Books Despair Immortality Wisdom

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Chekhov Happiness Siberia

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.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Happiness Love

And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Love Romance

Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life...Sasha: In life it's the same.Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life!

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Life Novels Romance

Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Determination Hope Perseverance

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Death Life

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.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Death Fashion Human Nature

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Broken Glass Glass Moon Moonshine Show Don T Tell Writing

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. If someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say: 'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Criticism Humor Writing

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.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Knowledge Nature

A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Friendship Relationships Sex

The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Connection Past Present Time

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Be Yourself Funny Inspiring

Science and art,... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,... then they only complicate and encumber life.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Artist Science

His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Books Reading Salvation

Lebedev: France has a clear and defined policy... The French know what they want. They just want to wipe out the Krauts, finish, but Germany, my friend, is playing a very different tune. Germany has many more birds in her sights than just France...Shabelsky: Nonsense! ...In my view the German are cowards and the French are cowards... They're just thumbing their noses at each other. Believe me, things will stop there. They won't fight.Borkin: And as I see it, why fight? What's the point of these armaments, congresses, expenditures? You know what I'd do? I'd gather together dogs from all over the country, give them a good dose of rabies and let them loose in enemy country. In a month all my enemies would be running rabid.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Dogs France Germany Humour War

Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Country Life Dreams Nostalgia Peace

It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Bias Destiny Dreams Happiness Illusions Life Goal Pushkin Truth

I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Chekhov Humor Seagull Women

Little girls ought to be taught and brought up with boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or she always thinks she's in the right. Instil into a little girl from her cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the general struggle for existence. We must give up our attitude to the physiological aspect, too -- to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in the first place women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all women have babies; and, thirdly, a normal countrywoman works in the fields up to the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then there ought to be absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a lady his chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water --

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Equality Men Women

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Indifference Philosophers Soul Wise

The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Art Artists

There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Work

We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Boredom Past Redemption Work

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of human

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Creative Process Detail Nature Show Don T Tell Writing

To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life -- it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Action Speak Louder Than Words Free Spirit Intellectuals Monasticism Nature World

And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Country Nature Town

She stood in awe of her elder daughter. Lida was never tender, she spoke only about serious things; she lived her own separate life and for her mother and sister was as sacred and slightly mysterious a personage as an admiral who always remains in his cabin is for his sailors.- The House with the Mezzanine

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Family

Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Idea Mind Thoughts

In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Anxiety Aversion Bias Confusion Discontent Nostalgia Real Life Reality Separation The Past

The sufferings which may be observed nowadays - they are so widespread and so vast - but people speak nevertheless about a certain moral improvement which society has achieved…

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Change Society Suffering

Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses every

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Negativity Psychology

No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Psychology Understanding Oneself And Others

MASHA. Just think, I am already beginning to forget her face. People will not remember us either. They will forget.VERSHININ. Yes. They will forget. That is our fate, you can't do anything about it. The things which to us seem serious, significant, very important, - the time will come - they will be forgotten or they will seem of no consequence.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Forgetting Future Nihilism Plays Time

Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Literature Medicine

Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.

~ Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Literature Russian
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