Uncle Vanya

by Anton Chekhov

existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life, and goes heavily. Every one about here is silly, and after living with them for two or three years one grows silly oneself. It is inevitable. [Twisting

for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing things that clever men have long known and stupid ones are not interested in;

Old people want to be pitied as much as young ones, but nobody cares about them somehow.

the world is not destroyed by villains and conflagrations, but by hate and malice and all this spiteful tattling. It is your duty to make peace, and not to growl at everything.

Those that have brains are hysterical, devoured with a mania for self-analysis. They whine, they hate, they pick faults everywhere with unhealthy sharpness.

There is no greater sorrow than to know another's secret when you cannot help them.

We are confronted by the degradation of our country, brought on by the fierce struggle for existence of the human race. It is the consequence of the ignorance and unconsciousness of starving, shivering, sick humanity that, to save its children, instinctively snatches at everything that can warm it and still its hunger. So it destroys everything it can lay its hands on, without a thought for the morrow. And almost everything has gone, and nothing has been created to take its place.

manet omnes una nox, that is to say, our lives are in the hands of God,