Anton Chekhov Quotes

I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student.

And what does it mean — dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

"When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind."

(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

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

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.

انتظري قليلا لا تتعجلي ..
فلدينا ما يكفي من الوقت ..
كي نصاب بالخيبة .

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 a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger — a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.

We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams.

Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it — just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.

She had a passionate longing for the garden, the darkness, the pure sky, the stars.