Anton Chekhov - Man Quotes

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In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn't the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.

Anton Chekhov
An enormously vast field lies between God exists and there is no God. The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.

Anton Chekhov
If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.

Anton Chekhov
Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.

Anton Chekhov
Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive... Everything that is unattainable for us now will one day be near and clear... But we must work.

Anton Chekhov
The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.

Anton Chekhov
I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious

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
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 man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.

Anton Chekhov
I'm a seagull. No, that's wrong. Remember you shot a seagull? A man happened to come along, saw it and killed it, just to pass the time. A plot for a short story.

Anton Chekhov
Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.

Anton Chekhov
It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.

Anton Chekhov
A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages—first an acquaintance, next a mistress, and only then a friend.

Anton Chekhov
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
Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.

Anton Chekhov
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

Anton Chekhov
Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that all of our problems come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.

Anton Chekhov
The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.

Anton Chekhov
Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.

Anton Chekhov
Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.

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
When a man spends the least possible number of movements over one definite action, that is grace.

Anton Chekhov
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.

Anton Chekhov
Tell me what you want, and I will tell you what manner of man you are.

Anton Chekhov
Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.

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