"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Man is what he believes."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Stories of Anton Chekhov)

"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."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

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

"These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"God forbid you should sacrifice the present for the future! There is youth, health, fire in the present; the future is smoke and deception!"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Even in Siberia there is happiness."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Favorite. Stories and the Play)

"La obras de arte se dividen en dos categorías: las que me gustan y las que no me gustan. No conozco ningún otro criterio."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"The person who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing can never be an artist."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him - disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Love, respect, friendship, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"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."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"If my life can ever be of any use to you, come and take it."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (The Sea-Gull)

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

"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."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: "Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who wore fur
boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"I feel like a donkey, with a stick in my mouth and a carrot up my ass."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Useless matters and conversations about the same thing took for their share the best part of one's time, the best of one's powers, and what was left in the end was some sort of curtailed, wingless life, some sort of nonsense, and it was impossible to get away or flee, as if you were sitting in a madhouse or a prison camp.
- The Lady with the Little Dog, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"He explained this too, and as he spoke he thought of his assignation, and that not a living soul knew of it, or ever would know. He had two lives; one obvious, which every one could see and know, if they were sufficiently interested, a life full of conventional truth and conventional fraud, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another, which moved underground. And by a strange conspiracy of circumstances, everything that was to him important, interesting, vital, everything that enabled him to be sincere and denied self-deception and was the very core of his being, must dwell hidden away from others, and everything that made him false, a mere shape in which he hid himself in order to conceal the truth, as for instance his work in the bank, arguments at the club, his favourite gibe about women, going to parties with his wife- all this was open. And, judging others by himself, he did not believe the things he saw, and assumed that everybody else also had his real vital life passing under a veil of mystery as under the cover of the night. Every man's intimate existence is kept mysterious, and perhaps, in part, because of that civilized people are so nervously anxious that a personal secret should be respected."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904)

"There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.
"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (The Best Russian Short Stories)

"What truth? You see where truth is, and where untruth is, but I seem to have lost my sight and see nothing. You boldly settle all important questions, but tell me, dear, isn't it because you're young, because you haven't had time to suffer till you settled a single one of your questions? You boldly look forward, isn't it because you cannot foresee or expect anything terrible, because so far life has been hidden from your young eyes? You are bolder, more honest, deeper than we are, but think only, be just a little magnanimous, and have mercy on me."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Why did she love him so? Women had always taken him to be other than he was, and they had loved in him, not himself, but a man their imagination had created, whom they had greedily sought all their lives; and then, when they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he met women, became intimate, parted, but not once did he love; there was anything else, but not love."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (The Lady With the Dog and Other Stories: The Tales of Chekhov)

"We shall see the sky sparkling in diamonds.
Мы увидим небо в амазах."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"One beautiful evening the not less beautiful minor government official Ivan Cherviakov was sitting in the second row of the orchestra looking through his opera-glasses at Les Cloches de Corneville. As he sat there he felt himself to be in the seventh heaven of happiness. But suddenly (in stories one often finds this ´suddenly´ authorsare right - life is full of the unexpected), suddenly his face grew wrinkled, his eyes rolled, and he held his breath - he took down his opera-glasses, bent forward, and - ha-choo ! He sneezed, as you see. (...) He saw that an old man who was sitting in front of him in the first row was painfully wiping his bald spot and the back of his neck with his glove and muttering something. In this old man Cherviakov recognized General Brizialov of the Department of Highways "
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Try to reason about love, and you will loose your reason.
"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom--there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am lost, I am lost; there is no doubt of that."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Ivanov)

"[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (The Letters of Anton Chekhov)

"I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

""Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"The only difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Don't tell me the moon is shining;
show me the glint of light on broken glass."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

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

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"MEDVIEDENKO
Why do you always wear mourning?

MASHA
I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy. "
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (The Seagull)