Anton Chekhov Quotes

Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things. What a delight it is to respect people! Only entropy comes easy. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of lif 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. Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds. Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business. An actress without talent, forty years old, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than the actress. The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected. How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out. A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field. A man can deceive his fiancee or his mistress as much as he likes and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher. But a daughter is a different matter. And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid! 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. I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write. People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them. You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him. I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest. A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there. Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self. I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student. Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse. In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won't be there to see it - but it's why we live, why we work. It's why we suffer. We're creating it. That's the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal. But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life! Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read - my own or other people's works - it all seems to me not short enough. In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines. If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.