Anton Chekhov Quotes

Idea for a short story. The shore of a lake, a young girl who's spent her whole life beside it, a girl like you She loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.

The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to.

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

أن ترى وتسمع كيف يكذبون، ثم يرمونك انت بالغباء لأنك تطيق هذا الكذب. أن تتحمل الإهانات والإذلال دون ان تجرؤ على الإعلان صراحة انك في صف الشرفاءالأحرار، بل تكذب انت نفسك وتبتسم وكل ذلك من اجل لقمة العيش، من أجل ركن دافئ، من أجل وظيفة حقيرة لا تساوي قرشا .. كلا حياة كهذه لم تعد محتملة !

When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.

We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.

Wine and tobacco destroy the individuality. After a cigar or a glass of vodka you are no longer Peter Sorin, but Peter Sorin plus somebody else. Your ego breaks in two: you begin to think of yourself in the third person.

Without solitude true happiness was impossible. The fallen angel was faithless to God probably only because he longed for solitude, which angles knew not.

Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years

Existence is tedious, anyway.

Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.

My thoughts about human happiness, for some peculiar reason, had always been tinged with a certain sadness.

Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.

The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spellbound by these magical surroundings - the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky - thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.

Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife's illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin... My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture.