Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth29 January 1860
CityTaganrog, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.
In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust.... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will.... Each hour is precious.
People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.
Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else's opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.
You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!
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.
Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty.
Eyes - the head's chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.
Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double-bass, and a fly settles on his flanks and tickles and buzzes. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: 'Look, I too am living on the earth. See, I can buzz, too, buzz about anything.'
I often wonder: suppose we could begin life over again, knowing what we were doing? Suppose we could use one life, already ended, as a sort of rough draft for another? I think that every one of us would try, more than anything else, not to repeat himself, at the very least he would rearrange his manner of life, he would make sure of rooms like these, with flowers and light ... I have a wife and two daughters, my wife's health is delicate and so on and so on, and if I had to begin life all over again I would not marry. ... No, no!
If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.
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.
Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one whokills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.