The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1 Quotes

“It is my opinion that every woman can be a writer.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of human beings.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“And how awful it is not to have any opinions!”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“But you are a mirage," said Kovrin. "Why are you here and sitting still? That does not fit in with the legend." "That does not matter," the monk answered in a low voice, not immediately turning his face towards him. "The legend, the mirage, and I are all the products of your excited imagination. I am a phantom." "Then you don't exist?" said Kovrin. "You can think as you like," said the monk, with a faint smile. "I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, so I exist in nature.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“And however that may be, my dear girl, you must think, you must realize how unclean, how immoral this idle life of yours is," Sasha went on. "Do understand that if, for instance, you and your mother and your grandmother do nothing, it means that someone else is working for you, you are eating up someone else's life, and is that clean, isn't it filthy?”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most glaring objects.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“Poetry's one thing and love is another. It's just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite another.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people. I”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“He did nothing and knew how to do nothing. He”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“Whenever Germans or Englishmen get together, they talk about the crops, the price of wool, or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects--but especially women.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“and if any of our dear ones die, it must be because it is the will of God, so we ought have fortitude and bear it submissively.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“the theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“surroundings--the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky--Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“Whatever one talked to him about he always brought it round to the same subject: that life was dull and stifling in the town; that the townspeople had no lofty interests, but lived a dingy, meaningless life, diversified by violence, coarse profligacy, and hypocrisy; that scoundrels were well fed and clothed, while honest men lived from hand to mouth; that they needed schools, a progressive local paper, a theatre, public lectures, the co-ordination of the intellectual elements; that society must see its failings and be horrified. In his criticisms of people he laid on the colours thick, using only black and white, and no fine shades; mankind was divided for him into honest men and scoundrels: there was nothing in between. He always spoke with passion and enthusiasm of women and of love, but he had never been in love.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“He was a man of Oriental type, not very intelligent, but straightforward and honest, not a bully, not a fop, and not a rake--virtues which, in the eyes of the general public, are equivalent to a certificate of being a nonentity and a poor creature.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“We talked, and when we got upon manual labour I expressed this idea: that what is wanted is that the strong should not enslave the weak, that the minority should not be a parasite on the majority, nor a vampire for ever sucking its vital sap; that is, all, without exception, strong and weak, rich and poor, should take part equally in the struggle for existence, each one on his own account, and that there was no better means for equalizing things in that way than manual labour, in the form of universal service, compulsory for all.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“When on a moonlight night you see a broad village street, with its cottages, haystacks, and slumbering willows, a feeling of calm comes over the soul; in this peace, wrapped away from care, toil, and sorrow in the darkness of night, it is mild, melancholy, beautiful, and it seems as though the stars look down upon it kindly and with tenderness, and as though there were no evil on earth and all were well. On the left the open country began from the end of the village; it could be seen stretching far away to the horizon, and there was no movement, no sound in that whole expanse bathed in moonlight.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“All sorts of things are done in the provinces through boredom, all sorts of unnecessary and nonsensical things! And that is because what is necessary is not done at all.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“I ask myself in perplexity, is it possible that this old, very stout, ungainly woman, with her dull expression of petty anxiety and alarm about daily bread, with eyes dimmed by continual brooding over debts and money difficulties, who can talk of nothing but expenses and who smiles at nothing but things getting cheaper--is it possible that this woman is no other than the slender Varya whom I fell in love with so passionately for her fine, clear intelligence, for her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello his Desdemona, for her "sympathy" for my studies? Could that woman be no other than the Varya who had once borne me a son?”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“Yes, one must admit that our philanthropy is useless, boring, and absurd. But still, you must agree, one can't sit with one's hand in one's lap; one must do something.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“Merchants, and still more their wives, are fonder of beggars than they are of their own workpeople,”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“To find one's immortality in the transmutation of substances is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future for the case after a precious violin has been broken and become useless.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“she was sensual, like all cold people, as a rule--and we both made a show of being united by a passionate, mutual love.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories

“we are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We”
― Anton Chekhov, The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories