Anton Chekhov Quotes

It's very hard, feeling that you're no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.

To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face

In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish - that is their strength.

Even while lying, you'll be believed if you speak with authority.

Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

All saints have past and all sinners have a future.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

Only one who loves can remember so well.

Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.

There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.

An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.

If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.

When you're thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that's faith; when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that's science.

If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.

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.

Man is what he believes.

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.

I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.

Women can't forgive failure.

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.

It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.

When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

Write, write, write-till your fingers break.

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.

I've noticed that people who get married cease to be curious.

It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

The teacher must be an actor, an artist,passionately in love with his work.

You ask me what life is. That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know.

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.

If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.

Write only of what is important and eternal.

In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.

Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.

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.

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.

Brevity - the sister of talent.

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.

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.

It's easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.

People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.

Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one's eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

To advise is not to compel.

In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because--I don't know why.

At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.

I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.

Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.