Anton Chekhov - People Quotes

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In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won"t be there to see it - but it"s why we live, why we work. It"s why we suffer. We"re creating it. That"s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.

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
When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'

Anton Chekhov
People who don't even notice whether it's summer or winter are lucky! If I lived in Moscow I don't think I'd care what the weather was like.

Anton Chekhov
By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.

Anton Chekhov
How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.

Anton Chekhov
Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.

Anton Chekhov
What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country; the people have no morals; and the boredom!

Anton Chekhov
There are plenty of people in the world, solitary by temperament, who try to retreat into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

Anton Chekhov
Love, friendship, and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.

Anton Chekhov
If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.

Anton Chekhov
Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one's dignity.

Anton Chekhov
One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.

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
The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them...

Anton Chekhov
People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most uninteresting things in their lives.

Anton Chekhov
Dinner at the "Continental" to commemorate the great reform [the abolition of the serfdom in 1861]. Tedious and incongruous. To dine, drink champagne, make a racket, and deliver speeches about national consciousness, the conscience of the people, freedom, and such things, while slaves in tail-coats are running round your tables, veritable serfs, and your coachmen wait outside in the street, in the bitter cold—that is lying to the Holy Ghost.

Anton Chekhov
I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.

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

Anton Chekhov
It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don't just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.

Anton Chekhov
People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.

Anton Chekhov
There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

Anton Chekhov
It's even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.

Anton Chekhov
These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

Anton Chekhov
No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
People should be beautiful in every way—in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts and in their innermost selves.

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
There are people whom even children's literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.

Anton Chekhov