Anton Chekhov Quotes

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

"Having sex is easy," he continued. "All you need to do is undress the woman. But it's what comes afterwards that's such a drag; such a load of nonsense!"

نعم , و لكن من المذنب ؟ اذا لم تكونوا سعداء فالذنب ذنبكم ! نعم , وماذا كنتم تطنون ؟ الانسان هو خالق سعادته. و بوسعكم , لو اردتم , ان تصبحوا سعداء , و لكنكم لا تريدون . أنتم تهربون من السعادة باصرار !

Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport.

A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.

Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make?

It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist's shop all over the house.

It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.

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

Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.

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

[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.

...in twenty years I've found only one intelligent man in the whole town, and he's mad.

What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.

Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and tortuous to write a bad one.