Quotes from Anton Chekhov

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

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

To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.

And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!

To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!

A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.

A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.

The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can't return even if it wants to.

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one's eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.

How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.

Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they'll find a means to be happy.

My mistress has come home; at last I've seen her. Now I'm ready to die.

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

Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense....

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.

The sea has neither meaning nor pity.

If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.

Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.

Love, respect, and friendship do unite a people as well as a common hatred does.