Anton Chekhov: Trending quotes (page 2)

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

“I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.”

“People should be beautiful in every way—in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts and in their innermost selves.”

“It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.”

“Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.”

“Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.”

“If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.”

“It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.”

“Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else’s opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.”

“It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.”

“Ah, but ignorance is better. At least then there's hope.”

“Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.”

“Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.”

“It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution.”

“An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes.”

“We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.”

“The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.”

“It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.”

“People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.”