Quotes by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

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Everything that is not clear to us appears as a miracle.

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To carve a face out of marble means to remove from this piece what does not belong to the face.

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Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

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To be a real man is to be a husband and dignified.

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A dirty fly can stain an entire wall, and a small misdeed can ruin everything.

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If you let your imagination run wild, keep your hand under control.

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If you fear loneliness, don't get married.

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If in the first act, on the stage, a gun hangs, in the last act, it must be fired.

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If you will work for the present, then your work will be insignificant; you must work with only the future in mind.

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They say that the truth triumphs in the end, but that is not true.

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Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.

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Vodka is white in color, but it stains the nose and blackens the reputation.

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Everything must be beautiful in man: the face, the clothes, the soul and the thoughts.

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Avoid sophisticated language. The language should be simple and elegant.

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Without work there can be no clean and happy life.

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Watch, work and don't waste yourself in vain!

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If your wife betrayed you, be glad that she betrayed you, and not the motherland.

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If too many medicines are given for a certain disease, it means that the disease is incurable.

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Must be clear minded, morally clean and physically fit.

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Those we fear, we flatter.

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The richness of language and the art of oratory have always gone hand in hand.

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Lying is like alcoholism. Liars lie even when they are dying.

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He who cannot conquer with the help of comfort, will not be able to conquer with the help of harshness.

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He who puts the peace of his loved ones above all else must renounce the intellectual life entirely.

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Brevity is the sister of talent.

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When I finished drinking the tea with a roll, I say to myself: I have no appetite! When I've finished reading a poem or a novel, I say: no, it's not right!

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When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters, but telegrams.

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Women without men wither, and men without women become fools.

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Going to Paris with your wife is like going to Tula with a samovar.

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If you want to have a little time, do nothing.

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We only need what we need.

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No one dies from happiness, but neither do they perish from unhappiness.

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Beginning judges are always confused by acquaintances entering the courtroom. And when they have to condemn one of their acquaintances, it can be seen that they want to sink in their shame.

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The law is useless to a fool.

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When nature is renewed, rejuvenated, refreshed, new hopes and new desires should be stirred up in man as well. But it is difficult to resurrect a person.

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Women, when they feel they are right, quarrel and cry, but when they feel they have sinned, they only cry.

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Lying with your eyes closed for one night, you can sometimes experience many happy decades.

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The given word is worth more than money.

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The essential condition of love is complete freedom.

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Men's logic can never defeat women's.

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Certainly, all women are a difficult puzzle.

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The word is not a sparrow, once it has flown, it can no longer be caught.

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In the silence of the evening, when one sees only the dim window, behind which nature slowly falls asleep, the outside world, when one hears only the hoarse barking of strange dogs and the faint whine of strangers' accordions, it is difficult for one to think of anything else but his distant, intimate nest. Anyone who has ever been on a pilgrimage, who was torn away from their homes and loved ones by necessity, compulsion or the whims of fate, knows how long and tiring the quiet village evenings in foreign landscapes tend to be.

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Thieves have always been smarter and more agile than guards.

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First you have to take care of a good priest, only then the school!

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A bad teacher does far less damage to a school than a bad priest.

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A person with a developed mind must have an aesthetic sense.

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When a person is bored and wants to sleep, it appears to him that nature is in the same state.

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All sadness and contemplation is an invitation.

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Speaking is even better with a woman. The women are stupid, but the second word brings tears to his eyes.

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A person in love is not a sharer. A lover is more than selfish.

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Love tolerates no indecision, no thoughtlessness.

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Blind love finds ideal beauty everywhere.

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It is not the new or the old form that is important, but that one should write, not care about any form, just write, because what needs to be written flows freely from one's soul.

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Medicine is my faithful wife, literature is my sweetheart. If I get bored of one, I spend my nights with the other.

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Once you have a prison and an insane asylum, someone has to sit in it.

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If you want, you can be different from the others. Beautiful young, poetic love flying into the world of dreams - only that can give happiness on earth!

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And so it is always, always, and I have no peace with myself, I feel that I am consuming my own life, that I am gathering the dust of the most beautiful flowers for the honey that I am throwing into someone's blind world, and in the process I am tearing off the flowers and trampling on their roots . Aren't I crazy?

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I'm alone, no one's love warms me, I'm cold, as if I were living underground, whatever I write, it's all dry, wooden and gloomy.

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Happy is he who does not even notice whether it is summer or winter.

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Usually, big things fall apart.

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Life should not be depicted as it is, nor as it should be, but as it appears in our dreams.

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Indifference is paralysis of the soul, premature death.

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Wine and tobacco wash away individuality. After a cigar or a glass of vodka (...) his self disintegrates and he relates to himself as a third person.

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It is better in this world to suffer torment from a lawful husband than to gnash one's teeth at the last judgment.

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Limited and vain people have moments when the knowledge that they are unhappy fills them with a certain satisfaction, and they even brag about their sufferings, flirting with reality in front of themselves.

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Whether we play on stage or write - the main thing is not fame, not brilliance, not what I dream about, but to be able to tolerate.

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We are all getting old, dear lady, the wind of time wears us down.

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An unhappy man is egotistical, angry, unjust, cruel, and even less inclined to understand his fellow men than a fool. Misfortune does not bind people together, but separates them from each other, even where similar pain could act as a link.

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If you ever need my life, just come and take it.

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Only those who believe in eternal life are consciously afraid of death: they are afraid of their sins.

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Talentless but ambitious people have no choice but to spoil the real talent.

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Everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting, except for the highest manifestations of the human spirit. The spirit, the intellect, draws a sharp line between animal and man, points to the divine origin of the latter, and to a certain extent even replaces immortality, which is absent. Based on this, then, the spirit is the only possible source of pleasure.

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There is nothing good on earth that does not have some abomination at its source.

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There is nothing terrible about being arrested and imprisoned if one's conscience is clear.

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People who come into contact with the suffering of others, such as judges, policemen, doctors, over time become so trained and hardened by habit that even if they wanted to, they could not treat their clients in any other way than coldly and formally. In this respect, they are no different from the farmer who kills a sheep or a calf in his backyard and doesn't even notice the blood. However, if the judge views the individual formally and without a soul, it does not take much for an innocent person to be deprived of all rights and property and sentenced to forced labor. All it takes is time: as much time as certain formalities are completed - and the judge is paid for them.

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No one lives his life without prison and prison.

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Every person lives his real, very interesting life under the cover of secrets - like under the cover of night. Every individual existence is based on a secret, which is perhaps why it is so important for a cultured person to respect the individual secret.

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If the nerves start to dance, the best remedy for this is work.

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Just as prisoners in prison, who are bound together by a common fate, feel their fate easier when they are together, in the same way, in life, we feel less shackled when we are in the company of people inclined to analysis and synthesis, and we spend time together in the exchange of proud and free ideas.

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To see man's immortality in the transformation of matter is as eccentrically foolish as predicting a bright future for a violin case after the expensive instrument inside it has broken and become useless.

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As long as society isolates from itself the criminals, the mentally ill and the disturbing elements in general, it is invincible.

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No matter how wonderful a dawn shines in a person's life, in the end they are just as well bound in a coffin and thrown into a pit.

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Free and penetrating thought, which seeks to understand life, and complete contempt for the frail vanities of the world: two blessings greater than which man has never known.

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Peace and contentment are not outside of man, but within him.

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An ordinary person expects good or bad from the outside, i.e. from a comfortable car or a warm room, and a thinking person from himself.

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The wise, or simply the thinking, contemplative person, stands out precisely because he despises suffering; he is always satisfied and does not wonder at anything.

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The lower the organism, the less sensitive it is and the weaker it reacts to the stimulus; the higher it is, the more receptive it is and the more violently it reacts to external reality.

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Only the spirit is interesting and noteworthy, everything else is petty and low.

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It is the doctors and the benevolent relatives who achieve, after all, that humanity becomes stupid; mediocrity is considered genius, and civilization crumbles.

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The higher a person's mental and moral standard, the freer he is, the more joy life brings him.

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Nothing escapes a woman's gaze, even that of a bloodhound. Women are sharp-eyed.

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Women in the blessed state like to be whimsical and usually deal with dark thoughts.

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Young women are not quick to forgive.

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Wise and scientific thoughts always lose the appetite.

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Execution kills instantly, life imprisonment slowly.

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The state is not god. He has no right to take a life that he could not give back even if he wanted to.

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Both the death penalty and life imprisonment are immoral.

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Voluntary imprisonment is much harder to bear than forced slavery. The knowledge that he has the right and the means to be free at any minute poisons every moment of his time in prison.

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Desire is the greatest enemy of those who live in bondage.

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There is nothing sadder than drinking good wine and not seeing anyone.

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The geniuses of different eras and countries speak different languages, but they all have the same flame.

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Life does not repeat itself, you have to take care of it.

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True joy is knowledge, and eternal life is a countless and inexhaustible source of knowledge.

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Genius and madness are related.

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Only everyday people are healthy and normal. Thoughts about nervous age, exhaustion, degeneration and the like can only excite those who are in reality looking for the purpose of life, i.e. flock people.

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If you want to be healthy and normal, join the herd.

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Even if there is no immortality, sooner or later the omnipotent human mind will invent it.

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True happiness can only be found in solitude.

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Silence is a man's beauty.

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The book is a sheet music, and the conversation is a song.

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To retire to a monastery means to renounce life, to destroy life.

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A living person is unable not to get excited and despair when he sees how he himself and others are being destroyed.

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What a noble part of the class, what happiness is the fate of the chosen one who serves eternal justice, among those who for many thousands of years have made man worthy of the kingdom of God, that is, they have freed humanity from many thousands of years of struggle, sin, and suffering, if they sacrifice everything to the ideal : youth, strength, health, if they are ready to die for the good of the community!

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The crisis can be endured by any half-hearted person - people grind in everyday life.

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It has a lot of rhetoric, but no logic.

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One must be a believer or seek the truth, otherwise life is bleak, bleak... To live and not know why cranes fly, why children are born, what the stars are in the sky... Or does one know , why is he alive, or is it all useless nonsense.

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It's hard to live with a woman you don't love.

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Blaming someone for falling in love or falling out of love is stupid (...); love and hate is not up to us.

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We see in each other a person who is capable of thinking and reasoning, and this makes us stand in solidarity, no matter how different our views may be.

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Every day something bad happens to me. I don't even grumble anymore, I'm used to it, I just put on a good picture.

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There is no complete happiness in our earthly life. Happiness normally carries the germs of poison within itself - or it is poisoned by something from the outside.

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Only vacationers have been given by God the ability to understand the beauty of nature, the rest of humanity is beaten with sinful ignorance regarding these beauties. People do not value their wealth. We do not protect what we have; in fact - we don't like what we have.

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Bragging and pride are sins unworthy of a noble soul.

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Man cannot go against his own nature.

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Punishment only works if rewards are also practiced.

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Silence as a punishment is more effective than a slap or a barrage of abusive words.

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Marrying without love is just as ugly and unmanly as going to mass for an unbeliever.

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Women never forgive failure.

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There are people who always say only smart and appropriate things, and yet you feel that they are stupid.

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The thing is not a bear, it does not run away into the forest.

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Every fool can face a crisis; everyday life is what grinds our energy.

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Love is a double-edged sword.

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The unconscious processes that take place in nature are inferior even to human stupidity, because in stupidity there is still consciousness and will, but in natural processes there is nothing. Only the coward, who has more fear of death than self-respect, can console himself with the fact that his body will continue to live in the grass, the fog, the toad.

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It is physically impossible to provide serious help to forty walk-in patients between breakfast and lunch, you just trick them involuntarily. Counting an average of twelve thousand patients per calendar year, the doctor deceives twelve thousand people. Investing serious patients in the hospital and dealing with them according to the rules of science - this is also impossible, because there are rules, but there is no science; and if a person stops being wise and just simply, pedantically follows the rules, like other doctors, then above all this requires cleanliness and ventilation, not stench and dirt; healthy food and not smelly sauerkraut soup; proper auxiliaries and not thieves.

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No words, no sound, nothing moves, it's almost unbelievable that nature can be so quiet. When one looks at the wide village street, the small houses, the fireplaces, the sleeping willows, the soul becomes quiet and the night envelops itself in the darkness of worries, sorrows, and tiring work, it becomes beautiful in its calm, quiet melancholy, and it is as if the stars too they would look at him with moved tenderness. One feels as if there is no longer any evil on earth, and everything is in the most beautiful order.

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Oh, freedom, oh, freedom! Even the distant hint, the faint hope of its coming, gives wings to the soul, doesn't it?

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There are quite a lot of lonely people in the world. It's like a snail or a clam, only it hides in its shell. This is perhaps some kind of atavism, a return to the time when man was not yet a social creature, but only lived alone in his cave.

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Allow me to express my best wishes on your name day and with all the warmth of my sincere heart to wish you health and all the good that girls of your age can wish for.

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There is not and cannot be such a boring and sad city in which a smart, educated person would be unnecessary. Suppose that of the hundred thousand inhabitants of this undoubtedly backward and rude city, there are only three like you. Of course, you cannot conquer the insensitive crowd, you will have to give way little by little, and you will be lost in the crowd of hundreds of thousands, life will suffocate you, but you will not disappear completely, you will not remain without any influence. Later, after you, maybe there will be six people like you, then twelve, and so on, until finally such people will make up the majority. After two or three centuries, life on earth will be amazingly beautiful. People need this kind of life, and if it's not here yet, we have to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, and prepare for it. That is why we must always see and know more than our father and grandfather knew and saw.

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We don't even know what they will consider big and important, and what they will consider small and ridiculous. Were not the discoveries of Copernicus or Columbus at first seen as useless and ridiculous, and were not the mad scribbles of an eccentric regarded as a real revelation? And it is also possible that our life, in which we are doing so well, will later be judged as strange, uncomfortable, meaningless, not pure enough, and perhaps even sinful.

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If a woman philosophizes or two women... that's it, please, quietly - it's not always priest cheese.

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Life is an annoying trap. When the thinking man reaches manhood and awakens to mature self-awareness, he involuntarily feels himself in a shackle from which there is no escape. After all, against the will of certain coincidences and contingencies, he was called to life from nothing... Why? For what? If he wants to know the meaning and purpose of his existence, he will be satisfied with any means; he knocks on the door, but it is not opened to him; eventually death comes - also against his will.

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Oh, why is man not immortal? What are the convolutions and centers of the brain, what is the purpose of vision, speech, self-consciousness, the sense of flame, if all of this is destined to go underground and eventually cool down with the earth's crust, and then for millions and millions of years I understand and aimlessly orbit the sun with the globe? In order for him to cool down and wander around aimlessly, it would not have been necessary to summon man from nothingness with his lofty, almost divine spirit, and then turn him again, as if mockingly, into a lump of mud.

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People only remember their enemies and forget their friends.

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Suffering leads to perfection.

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A word, no matter how beautiful or deeply soothing it may be, only affects the single-minded, but it cannot always satisfy the very happy or the very unhappy. That is why the best expression of joy or misfortune is mostly silence: lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and the hot, passionate speech delivered at the grave affects only those who are far away, it sounds cold and meaningless in the ears of the deceased's widow and children.

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If a rifle appears in the first act, it will go off in the next. Otherwise you have nothing to gain there.

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The only difference between lawyers and doctors is that lawyers rob and doctors rob and even kill.

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Apparently, this is the law of human coexistence: the more incomprehensible the offense, the more desperate and harsh the fight against it.

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If we imagine that in a million years a soul will fly away in space next to the globe, you will see nothing but clay and barren cliffs on the surface of the earth. Everything is destroyed, civilization, the moral law, not even a sheet of paper grows in its wake.

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All civil servants enjoy a pension, regardless of whether they have worked with honor or not. The distorted fairness of our time consists precisely in the fact that ranks, orders of merit, and pensions do not reward the moral merits and intellectual abilities of office holders, but service in general, regardless of its quality.

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The doctrine which preaches that we should be indifferent to riches and the pleasures of life, and despise suffering and death, is completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of mankind, because this majority has never known either wealth or pleasure; and to despise suffering would mean to him as much as to despise life itself, because the whole existence of a person consists in suffering from hunger, cold, injury, loss, and finally from Hamlet's fear of death. These sufferings make up the whole of life: you can hate it, find it burdensome, difficult, but you can't despise it.

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If a gun is hanging on the wall in the first act of a play, it must go off in the third act.

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Waiting to drink is the hardest of all waiting. One would rather wait five hours in the snow and ice for the train than five minutes to drink.

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When a person is told that his kidneys are bad, or his heart is enlarged, and they begin to heal him, or they say that he is crazy or a criminal, i.e. when his environment suddenly notices him for some reason, then he already knows that he has reached a dead end , from which there is no way out. He searches, searches for a way out, and gets more and more entangled. And in this case, man can do nothing but surrender, because no human effort can save him anymore.

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Like cures like.

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The sanguine woman - the most intolerable of women, if not stupid.

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The choleric woman - a devil in a skirt, a crocodile.

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The melancholic woman is an unbearable, restless creature. As a wife - she drives a man into stupidity, despair, and suicide. His only good feature is that you can easily get rid of him: you have to give him money, let him go on a pilgrimage.

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Nowhere can you get into a confidential relationship as quickly and pleasantly as while traveling!

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In words, (...) in the nineteenth century, one achieves nothing, since (...) theory cannot exist without practice.

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The phlegmatic woman (...) came into the world only to become a mother-in-law in time.

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It is no coincidence that the poets who sing about women mention the moon! In the moonlight, the woman becomes a hundred times more beautiful.

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Women only become witches when they are old.

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Holy age - childhood.

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A man's bosom is a woman's strength.

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The gaze is the pallor of the soul.

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Whom the gods love, pigs do not eat.

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The hearts of educated people are not so much softened by money as by pleasant manners and a polite throat grab.

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The dark night - day in a nutshell.

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The wail of the wind - the wail of a conscience drowning in terrible sins.

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The moon - a dispassionate, silent witness to the sweet moments of love and revenge.

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A strong man pushing his enemy into the crater of a crater for the sake of a beautiful woman is a majestic, great and instructive sight.

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Tears of joy are caused by the divine power burning in the depths of a loving heart.

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Death is a shackle, but it is also freedom from shackles.

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Four hours for a lover - four nineteenth centuries!

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A few months is not enough for prejudices. Prejudices are hardy, like fish, they need long centuries.

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Even the feet hurt from a bad head!

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Friendship is only one step away from love.

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Men cannot understand all the horrors of misery as well as women. A poor beggar woman is the most unfortunate creature.

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In the midst of strife and war, time moves faster than in peacetime.

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Nothing overextends you, nothing destroys your nerves as much as waiting.

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Shy love is like a fairy tale for larks.

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There is nothing worse, more torturous and more excruciating than walking around the market in the hat you inherited from your father, seeing, hearing, feeling and smelling when there is not a single penny in your pocket.

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Where there is love, there is also the most profound faith.

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A loved one's life is more valuable than money.

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Mothers love medicine, they believe in it when their children are sick!

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The conscience of every handsome artist is burdened by many women, and in order to remember them all, one would need a very good memory.

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Better to be drunk and merry than sober and listless.

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The unshakable, permanent law of life is meanness. Man was given life as a punishment for his vileness.

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Everything in the world (...) depends on chance, everything is subject to chance! Chance is a tyrant.

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The globe is not a very good place for art. The earth is large and spacious, but the writer cannot find a place for himself anywhere. The writer is a perpetual orphan, an exile, a scapegoat, a defenseless child.

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The writer's love - Etna and Vesuvius combined.

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Better by the door than hiccuping in our lover's ear.

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A drunk has a better heart and is smarter than a sober one. A drunk likes music more than a sober person. (...) If there were no drunks in the world, art wouldn't get far!

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We forget nothing except our benefactors.

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We can't get the wolf used to eating hay.

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A full stomach does not like to study.

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When children are asked why they are crying, they usually sob even harder. The same thing happens with women.

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You can't protest, because a man is a husband, and the word husband translated into holiday language means an unwilling draft animal, you can ride him endlessly and non-stop, and you can put all the burdens on him without limitation, without the intervention of the animal protection association.

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Marriage is a serious step! The matter must be carefully considered from all sides.

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If a woman cheats on an old husband whom she cannot stand, it is immoral, but if she suppresses her unfortunate youth and lively feelings - it is not immoral. Where is the logic in this, the devil take it away?

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It's not about the money. Even the poor can be happy.

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Whoever cheats on his wife or husband is untrustworthy, he can easily betray his country too!

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If a thousand different remedies are recommended for a disease, then surely none of them are good, that disease is incurable.

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The main thing is that you make up your own mind. If a person ponders and hesitates for a long time, if he only chatters, chatters, and waits for the ideal, the true love, then he will surely never get married.

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A woman in love can only sulk and whine! The man suffers and makes one victim after another, the woman only moves her skirt and tries to ensnare the man in love as tightly as possible.

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At any moment, death can take you with a terrible surprise.

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I am myself, like the wind in the plain... I die, no one mourns me... terrible alone.

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We often come across this "sudden" in narratives. The writers are right: life is so full of unexpected surprises!

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In fact, everything is beautiful in this world, everything, except for what we ourselves think and do, when we forget the higher goals of existence, our human dignity.

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With one hand I only lift one and a half puds, but with two I can lift five or even six puds. From this I conclude that two people are not twice as strong as one person, but at least three times stronger.

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A person must toil, work with the sweat of his brow, whoever he is, and only in this is the meaning and purpose of life, the happiness and beauty of man. How beautiful is the life of the worker who gets up at dawn and breaks stones on the road, or the shepherd or the teacher who teaches children, or the train driver on the railway... My God, how much more is not only the person who works, but the bastard too, the draft horse too, like that young woman who wakes up at noon, then drinks coffee in bed, then spends two hours getting dressed!

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Love cannot be won by violence.

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When it starts snowing, on the first day, when sleighs appear on the street, it's pleasant to look at the white earth, the white roofs, it's nice to breathe in the fresh air, this is when you tend to remember your youth. The old, frost-covered lindens and birches look benevolent, they are closer to the heart than cypresses and palms, in their vicinity one does not even want to think about mountains and seas.