Quotes from Anton Chekhov

You ask me what life is. That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know.

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

Life has gone by as if I never lived

I'm in mourning for my life.

We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.

I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.

In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish - that is their strength.

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

If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others' expense.

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.

Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.

Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.

You look boldly ahead; isn't it only that you don't see or divine anything terrible in the future; because life is still hidden from your young eyes.

The teacher must be an actor, an artist,passionately in love with his work.

A person loves to talk about his illnesses although that is the least interesting part of his life.

Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!

It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.

There are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate.

In all my life I never met anyone so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike. I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold and you don't seem to understand what I say.

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.