Anton Chekhov: Man

Anton Chekhov was Russian dramatist, author and physician. Explore interesting quotes on man.

Anton Chekhov: 444 quotes5 likes

“Between "there is a God" and "there is no God" lies a whole vast tract, which the really wise man crosses with great effort. A Russian knows one or other of these two extremes, and the middle tract between them does not interest him; and therefore he usually knows nothing, or very little.”

Diary, 1897
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.”

Episode from a Practice

“After us they’ll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, “Oh! Life is so hard!””

and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
Act II
The Three Sisters (1901)

“Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.”

Difficult People https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chekhov/anton/c51wif/chapter2.html (1886)