Anton Chekhov Quotes

When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.

We learn about life not from pluses alone, but from minuses as well.

The cherry orchard is now mine!... I bought the estate on which my grandfather and father were slaves, where they were not even permitted in the kitchen.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

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.

I drank so much in Peter<sburg> that Russia should be proud of me!

Only one who loves can remember so well.

My love was pathetic and was soon noticed by every one--my father, the neighbours, and the peasants--and they all sympathised with me. When I stood the workmen ... would bow and say: "May the Kotlovitch young lady be your bride, please God!"

Writers are as jealous as pigeons.

ما هذه الليالي التي بلا معنى وأي أيام مملة باهتة ! اللعب المحموم والأكل حتى التخمة والسٌكْر والأحاديث المكررة عن نفس الشيء. الأعمال التي لا ضرورة لها والأحاديث المكررة تستولى على أفضل ساعات العمر وعلى أفضل القوى ولا يبقى في النهاية سوى حياة مبتورة، مقصوصة الجناحين، لا يبقى سوى هراء ولا تستطيع ان تهرب منه أو تفر، كأنما وضعت في مستشفى المجانين أو في السجن.

There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.

Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.

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. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

She thought that before old age and death there would be a long, long life before her, and that day by day she would have to put up with being close to a man she did not love, who had just now come into the bedroom and was getting into bed, and would have to stifle in her heart her hopeless love for the other young, fascinating, and, as she thought, exceptional man. She looked at her husband and tried to say good-night to him, but suddenly burst out crying instead. She was vexed with herself. And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for a minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever, ironical face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.