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.

Chekhov's Doctors: A Collection of Chekhov's Medical Tales (ed. Kent State University Press, 2003) - ISBN: 9780873387804