"Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts."

~ Anton Chekhov #Botd 1860

Osip Braz: Portrait of Anton Chekhov

"Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life."
~ 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

"Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice."
~ Anton Chekhov

"Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity."
~ Anton Chekhov

Chekhov with Leo Tolstoy at Yalta, 1900

"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."
~ Anton Chekhov

Chekhov's family and friends in 1890

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
~ Anton Chekhov

"There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality."
~ Anton Chekhov

"The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly."
~ Anton Chekhov

"A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does."
~ 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

"Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, ...

... a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?"
~ Anton Chekhov

"Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf."
~ Anton Chekhov

"I have the feeling that I've seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants."
~ Anton Chekhov

"You will not become a saint through other people's sins."
~ Anton Chekhov

"People's destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring—they're all alike, and they're all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you—you're one in a million. You're happy—"
~ Anton Chekhov

"If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: "Nothing passes away." I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence." ~ Chekhov

"If you want to work on your art, work on your life."
~ Anton Chekhov

"If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter"
~ Anton Chekhov