Anton Chekhov Men Quotations

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. ... It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom--there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am lost, I am lost; there is no doubt of that.

I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.

A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.

[In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious

In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

An enormously vast field lies between "God exists" and "there is no God." The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.

Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive... Everything that is unattainable for us now will one day be near and clear... But we must work.

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.

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.

A man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.

There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.

The more cultured a man, the less fortunate he is.

Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.

A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.

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.

The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.

A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.

Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.

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.

A man can deceive his fiancee or his mistress as much as he likes and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher. But a daughter is a different matter.

Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

Idea for a short story. The shore of a lake, a young girl who's spent her whole life beside it, a girl like you She loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

Anna Petrovna (to Shabelsky): You can't make a simple joke without an injection of venom. You are a poisonous man. Joking apart, Count, you're very poisonous. It's hideously boring to live with you. You're always grumpy, complaining, you find everyone bad, good for nothing. Tell me frankly, Count, did you ever speak well of anyone?

Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.

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.

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.

Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general senseand the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reasons lie not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.

It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.