Anton Chekhov: Trending quotes (page 9)

“Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.”

“There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.”

“We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.”

“The cherry orchard is now mine!… I bought the estate on which my grandfather and father were slaves, where they were not even permitted in the kitchen.”

“Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?”

“An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.”

“Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.”

“The sea has neither meaning nor pity.”

“Instructing in cures, therapists always recommend that “each case be individualized.” If this advice is followed, one becomes persuaded that those means recommended in textbooks as the best, means perfectly appropriate for the template case, turn out to be completely unsuitable in individual cases.”

“I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.”

“Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write.”

“A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.”

“There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”

“I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.”

“People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.”

“Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.”

“Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.”

“Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.”

“There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.”