Anton Chekhov Quotes. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, playwright and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress." Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theater... (wikipedia)
Anton Chekhov — Russian Dramatist born on January 29, 1860, died on July 14, 1904
Anton Chekhov Quotes
1. Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies, only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.
2. I understand that in our work—doesn’t matter whether it’s acting or writing—what’s important isn’t fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about. It’s the ability to endure.
3. Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.
4. 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.
5. There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions.
6. You look at life—the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying.
7. Evidently, the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible.
8. We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka.
9. How easy it is, Doctor, to be a philosopher on paper, and how difficult in real life!
10. The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
11. I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don’t want to understand you.
12. In your books, I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms.
13. The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages, but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.
14. Everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.
15. He had two lives—one, open, seen, and known by all who cared to know—full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret.
16. I should think I’m going to be a perpetual student.
17. 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.
18. Let us learn to appreciate that there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.
19. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.
20. Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave’s blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being—not a slave’s coursing through his veins.
21. For God’s sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch.
22. 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!
23. 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.
24. I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith. Otherwise, our life is empty.
25. What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?
26. Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.
27. I understood that when you love, you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.
28. In Moscow, you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don’t feel like a stranger. But here, you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger.
29. 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.
30. You’ve never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years. You just think I’m a mad person who has thrown his life away. Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there’s no way of getting it out of him.
31. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.
32. When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it cannot be cured.
33. 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.
34. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.
35. I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninteresting, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.
36. 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.
37. Every individual existence revolves around mystery, and perhaps that is the chief reason that all cultivated individuals insist so strongly on respect due to personal secrets.