Anton Chekhov Quotes

You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.

Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport.

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.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train or a steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him. I consider his philosophy won’t last long, however. It’s more showy than convincing.

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.

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

Even while lying, you’ll be believed if you speak with authority.

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.

In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.

There are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate.