Anton Chekhov - Life Quotes

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The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

Anton Chekhov
Life isn't finished for us yet! We're going to live!…Maybe, if we wait a little longer, we shall find out why we live, why we suffer.

Anton Chekhov
Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

Anton Chekhov
You ask What is life? That is the same as asking What is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more.

Anton 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 Chekhov
When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, life consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.

Anton Chekhov
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.

Anton Chekhov
Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.

Anton Chekhov
Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

Anton Chekhov
Medvedenko: Why do you wear black all the time?
Masha: I'm in mourning for my life, I'm unhappy.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
A tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples' character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe.... What a terrible future!

Anton Chekhov
I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.

Anton Chekhov
He who doesn't know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others' successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs.

Anton Chekhov
Nina: Your play's hard to act, there are no living people in it.
Treplev: Living people! We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams.

Anton Chekhov
Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

Anton Chekhov
It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others' expense.

Anton Chekhov
Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.

Anton Chekhov
You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.

Anton Chekhov
An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.

Anton Chekhov
We learn about life not from pluses alone, but from minuses as well.

Anton Chekhov
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
If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

Anton Chekhov
When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you'll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you'll eat yourself.

Anton Chekhov
Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.

Anton Chekhov
All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

Anton Chekhov
Science is the most important, the most magnificent, and the most necessary element of life.

Anton Chekhov
You look boldly ahead; isn't it only that you don't see or divine anything terrible in the future; because life is still hidden from your young eyes.

Anton Chekhov
Man must work by the sweat of his brow whatever his class, and that should make up the whole meaning and purpose of his life and happiness and contentment.

Anton Chekhov
Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?

Anton Chekhov