Quotes from Anton Chekhov

The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.

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.

When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given.

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

A man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.

A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.

The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.

Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.

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

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

Only entropy comes easy.

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.

Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields.

People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.

If you can't distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn't undertake philanthropic work.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

If one wants to lead a good life, A HUMAN LIFE, one must work.

Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.

You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly.

The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood!