Jan 29, 1860 - Jul 15, 1904
was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature
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It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
The snow has not yet left the earth but spring is already asking to enter your heart...
Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.
One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions,
Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.
In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.
The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.
Faith is a capacity of the spirit. It is like talent: you have to be born with it
To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face
I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks.
Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
My love is like a stone tied round my neck; it's dragging me down to the bottom; but I love my stone. I can't live without it.
My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom--freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.
Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty.
Write, write, write-till your fingers break.
Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
Eyes - the head's chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.
Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double-bass, and a fly settles on his flanks and tickles and buzzes. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: 'Look, I too am living on the earth. See, I can buzz, too, buzz about anything.'
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.
They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.
To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.
Only one who loves can remember so well.
The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.
He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
It's very hard, feeling that you're no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.
It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.
A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.
It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.
