727 Quotes by Anton Chekhov

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.

Science and art,... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,... then they only complicate and encumber life.

You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure.

The State is not God. It has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should so desire.