Quotes from Anton Chekhov

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

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

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

No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.

I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer. He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscious and his sense of duty.

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

I am dying. I haven't drunk champagne for a long time.

A fiance is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it's unimaginable.

I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.