Anton Chekhov

A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.

I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student.

Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.

In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.

The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.

It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.

Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let's have a philosophical conversation.

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

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

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

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.

He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.

Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.

Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

[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.

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.

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.