Quotes from Anton Chekhov

Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.

Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something.

If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.

To live simply to die is by no means amusing, but to live with the knowledge that you will die before your time, that's really is idiotic

I expect I shall be a student to the end of my days.

Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.

When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you'll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you'll eat yourself.

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.

There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.

When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean-that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses-that is science.

When you're thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that's faith when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that's science.

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.

..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.

Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

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

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.

If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.

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