Anton Chekhov Quotes

...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings 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.

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

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. 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.

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.

Only one who loves can remember so well.

"Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions."

(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.

We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. 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.

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.

رأسي مكتظ ، ممتلئ إلى حافته بالأفكار ، و استطيع أن أحس بنبضه و اختلاجاته . أنا لا أهدف إلى أن أكون شيئا غير عادي ، و لا أتوقع أن أخلق إحدي الروائع ، كل ما أريده هو أن أعيش ، و أحلم ، و أتطلع ، و لا يفوتني شئ .. الحياة يا صديقى العزيز ، قصيرة جدا ، و يجب أن نستغلها بأقصي ما نستطيع

..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.