Anton Chekhov: Trending quotes

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“It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don’t just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.”

Anton Chekhov

Episode from a Practice or A Doctor's Visit (1898)

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (June 16, 1892)
Letters

“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.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to I.I. Orlov (February 22, 1899)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Act I
Uncle Vanya (1897)

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (January 2, 1894)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (March 27, 1894)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Act I
The Cherry Orchard (1904)

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

“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.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to K.S. Barantsevich (March 30, 1888)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

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

Anton Chekhov

Act II
Uncle Vanya (1897)

“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.”

Anton Chekhov Ivanov

Ivanov, Act III, sc. vi (1887)

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.N. Pleshcheev (April 9, 1889)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“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.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

The Fruits of Long Meditations (1884)

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

Anton Chekhov

An Evil Night (1886)

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

Anton Chekhov

The Story of an Unknown Man or An Anonymous Story, ch. 15 (1893)

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to E.M. Shavrova (April 6, 1892)
Letters