Anton Chekhov: Man

“Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be.”

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

“If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.”

“Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.”

“It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.”

“In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.”

“It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.”

“In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness…. The expanses are so great that the little man hasn’t the resources to orient himself…. This is what I think about Russian suicides.”

“Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.”

“A woman can only become a man’s friend in three stages: first, she’s an agreeable acquaintance, then a mistress, and only after that a friend.”

“In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.”

“A nice man would feel ashamed even before a dog.”

“A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.”

“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever…. Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”

“At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.”