Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“ If a man takes up work which is alien to him, art for instance, then, since it is impossible for him to become an artist, he becomes an official. What a lot of people thus play the parasite round science, the theatre, the painting,—by putting on a uniform! Likewise the man to whom life is alien, who is incapable of living, nothing else remains for him, but to become an official. ”

“ I thought, we uncultured, worn-out people, banal in speech, stereotyped in intentions, have grown quite mouldy, and, while we intellectuals are rummaging among old rags and, according to the old Russian custom, biting one another, there is boiling up around us a life which we neither know nor notice. ”

“ Why does the sun come out from behind the temple and gild the palm tree? Why this beauty of women? Where does the bird hurry, what is the meaning of its flight, if it and its young and the place to which it hastens will, like myself, turn to dust? ”

“ An actress, forty years old, ugly, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than that actress. ”

“ A young man dreams of devoting himself to literature and constantly writes to his father about it; at last he gives up the civil service, goes to Petersburg, and devotes himself to literature—he becomes a censor. ”

“ Mother never stops talking about poverty. It is very strange. In the first place, it is strange that we are poor, beg like beggars, and at the same time eat superbly, live in a large house; in the summer we go to our own country house, and generally speaking we do not look like beggars. Evidently this is not poverty, but something else, and rather worse. ”

“ So long as a man likes the splashing of a fish, he is a poet; but when he knows that the splashing is nothing but the chase of the weak by the strong, he is a thinker; but when he does not understand what sense there is in the chase, or what use in the equilibrium which results from destruction, he is becoming silly and dull, as he was when a child. ”

“ Be a peasant until you die, do not become a nobleman, nor a merchant, nor a bourgeois. If, as you say, the Zemstvo officer now has the right to inflict corporal punishment on peasants, then let him also have the right to punish you. ”

“ When the man who carried the torch at funerals came out in his three-cornered hat, his frock coat with laces and stripes, she fell in love with him.
* * * * *
A sparkling, joyous nature, a kind of living protest against grumblers; he is fat and healthy, eats a great deal, every one likes him but only because they are afraid of the grumblers; he is a nobody, a Ham, only eats and laughs loud, and that's all; when he dies, every one sees that he had done nothing, that they had mistaken him for some one else. ”

“ A man, forty years old, married a girl of twenty-two who read only the very latest writers, wore green ribbons, slept on yellow pillows, and believed in her taste and her opinions as if they were law; she is nice, not silly, and gentle, but he separates from her.
* * * * *
When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean—that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses—that is science. ”

“ An income-tax inspector and an excise official, in order to justify their occupations to themselves, say spontaneously: "It is an interesting profession, there is a lot of work, it is a live occupation." ”

“ Everybody goes to the theatre to see my play, to learn something instantly from it, to make some sort of profit, and I tell you: I have not the time to bother about that canaille.
* * * * *
The people hate and despise everything new and useful; when there was cholera, they hated and killed the doctors and they love vodka; by the people's love or hatred one can estimate the value of what they love or hate. ”

“ A Mussulman for the salvation of his soul digs a well. It would be a pleasant thing if each of us left a school, a well, or something like that, so that life should not pass away into eternity without leaving a trace behind it. ”

“ A woman imagines that she has a peculiar, exceptional constitution, whose ailments are different from other people's and which cannot stand ordinary medicine. She thinks that her son is unlike other people's sons, that he has to be brought up differently. ”

“ To me that is the strangest thing of all, most terrible. She has, as she has just said, a thought on her brain, she begs, she humiliates herself; our debts grow daily and up till now I have not done a single thing to help her. ”

“ The couple lived happily; every one envies them, and indeed their life passes smoothly and placidly; she is satisfied, and, when people discuss love, she says that for family life not love nor passion is wanted, but affection. ”

“ They say that poverty threatens us and that in poverty there is disgrace, but that too I cannot understand, since I was never poor.
* * * * *
The spiritual life of these women is as gray and dull as their faces and dresses; they speak of science, literature, tendencies, and the like, only because they are the wives and sisters of scholars and literary men; were they the wives and sisters of inspectors or of dentists, they would speak with the same zeal of fires or teeth. To allow them to speak of science, which is foreign to them, and to listen to them, is to flatter their ignorance. ”

“ Great events will take us unawares, like sleeping fairies, and you will see that Sidorov, the merchant, and the teacher of the school at Yeletz, who see and know more than we do, will push us far into the background, because they will accomplish more than all of us put together. ”

“ The wife writes; the husband does not like her writing, but out of delicacy says nothing and suffers all his life.
* * * * *
The fate of an actress: the beginning—a well-to-do family in Kertch, life dull and empty; the stage, virtue, passionate love, then lovers; the end: unsuccessful attempt to poison herself, then Kertch, life at her fat uncle's house, the delight of being left alone. Experience shows that an artist must dispense with wine, marriage, pregnancy. The stage will become art only in the future, now it is only struggling for the future. ”

“ The first night, when they returned to his mining village, she went to bed and suddenly burst into tears, because she did not love him. He is a good soul, is overwhelmed with distress, and goes off to sleep in his little working room. ”

“ A progressive, educated, young, but stingy school guardian inspects the school every day, makes long speeches there, but does not spend a penny on it: the school is falling to pieces, but he considers himself useful and necessary. ”

“ If you are politically sound, that is enough for you to be considered a perfectly satisfactory citizen; the same thing with radicals, to be politically unsound is enough, everything else will be ignored. ”

“ He was afraid to love Nadya, because he was too old for her, thought his appearance unattractive, and did not believe that young girls like Nadya could love men for their minds and spiritual qualities. ”

“ A girl, flirting, chatters: "All are afraid of me ... men, and the wind ... all leave me alone! I shall never marry." And at home poverty, her father a regular drunkard. And if people could see how she and her mother work, how she screens her father, they would feel the deepest respect for her and would wonder why she is so ashamed of poverty and work, and is not ashamed of that chatter.
* * * * *
A restaurant. An advanced conversation Andrey Andreyevitch, a good-natured bourgeois, suddenly declares: "Do you know gentlemen, I was once an anarchist!" Every one is astonished. ”

“ Simple people suffer from mothers-in-law, intellectuals from daughters-in-law.
"My elder son's wife is educated, arranges Sunday schools and libraries, but she is tactless, cruel, capricious, and physically revolting. At dinner she will suddenly go off into sham hysterics because of some article in the newspaper. An affected thing." Another daughter-in-law: "In society she behaves passably, but at home she is a dolt, smokes, is miserly, and when she drinks tea, she keeps the sugar between her lips and teeth and speaks at the same time." ”

“ A young philologist, who has just left the University, comes home to his native town. He is elected churchwarden. He does not believe in God, but goes to church regularly, makes the sign of the cross when passing near a church or chapel, thinking that that sort of thing is necessary for the people and that the salvation of Russia is bound up with it. He is elected chairman of the Zemstvo board and a Justice of the Peace, he wins orders and medals; he does not notice that he has reached the age of forty-five ”

“ Another person went with us, a Councillor of State, middle-aged, silent, because he thinks he is right and despises the critic, because he too is without talent. A girl afraid to smile because she is among clever people. ”

“ With insects, out of the caterpillar comes the butterfly; with mankind it is the other way round, out of the butterfly comes the caterpillar. [1]
[Footnote 1: There is a play on words here, the Russian word for butterfly also means a woman.] ”

“ When a woman destroys things like a man, people think it natural and everybody understands it; but when like a man, she wishes or tries to create, people think it unnatural and cannot reconcile themselves to it. ”

“ A large factory. The young employer plays the superior to all and is rude to the employees who have University degrees. Only the gardener, a German, has the courage to be offended: "How dare you, gold bag?"
* * * * *
A tiny little schoolboy with the name of Trachtenbauer.
* * * * *
Whenever he reads in the newspaper about the death of a great man, he wears mourning.
* * * * *
In the theatre. A gentleman asks a lady to take her hat off, as it is in his way. Grumbling, disagreeableness, entreaties. At last a confession: "Madam, I am the author of the play." She answered: "I don't care." ”

“ When I stop drinking tea and eating bread and butter, I say: "I have had enough." But when I stop reading poems or novels, I say: "No more of that, no more of that."
* * * * *
A solicitor lends money at a high rate of interest, and justifies himself because he is leaving everything to the University of Moscow.
* * * * *
A little sexton, with radical views: "Nowadays our fellows crawl out from all sorts of unexpected holes."
* * * * *
The squire N. always quarrels with his neighbors who are Molokans [1] ; he goes to court, abuses and curses them ”

“ In the evening there suddenly arrives from the railway station a stranger Z., a young girl, who introduces herself and says that she has come to look after the invalid. He is perplexed, frightened, he refuses; then Z. says that at any rate she will stay the night. A day passes, two, and she goes on living there. She has an unbearable temper, she poisons one's existence. ”

“ The power and salvation of a people lie in its intellegentsia, in the intellectuals who think honestly, feel, and can work.
* * * * *
A man without a mustache is like a woman with a mustache.
* * * * *
A man who cannot win a woman by a kiss will not win her by a blow.
* * * * *
For one sensible person there are a thousand fools, and for one sensible word there are a thousand stupid ones; the thousand overwhelms the one, and that is why cities and villages progress so slowly. The majority, the mass, always remain stupid; it will always overwhelm ”

“ A rich man, usually insolent, his conceit enormous, but bears his riches like a cross. If the ladies and generals did not dispense charity on his account, if it were not for the poor students and the beggars, he would feel the anguish of loneliness. If the beggars struck and agreed not to beg from him, he would go to them himself.
* * * * *
The husband invites his friends to his country-house in the Crimea, and afterwards his wife, without her husband's knowledge, brings them the bill and is paid for board and lodging. ”

“ Those who are more stupid and more dirty than we are called the people. The administration classifies the population into taxpayers and non-taxpayers. But neither classification will do; we are all the people and all the best we are doing is the people's work.
* * * * *
If the Prince of Monaco has a roulette table, surely convicts may play at cards.
* * * * *
Iv. (Chekhov's brother Ivan) could philosophize about love, but he could not love. ”

“ A Government official began to live an original life; a very tall chimney on his house, green trousers, blue waistcoat, a dyed dog, dinner at midnight; after a week he gave it up.
* * * * *
Success has already given that man a lick with its tongue.
* * * * *
In the bill presented by the hotel-keeper: was among other things:
"Bugs—fifteen kopecks." Explanation.
* * * * *
"N. has fallen into poverty."—"What? I can't hear."—"I say N. has fallen into poverty."—"What exactly do you say? I can't make out. What N.?"—"The N. who married Z."—"Well, what of it?"—"I say we ought to help him."—"Eh? ”

“ He would drink tea for hours and this infuriated her. Living with her husband she grew thin, ugly, spiteful, stamped her foot and shouted at him: "Leave me, you low fellow." She hated him. She worked, and people paid the money to him, for, being a Zemstvo worker, she took no money, and it enraged her that their friends did not understand him and thought him ideal.
* * * * *
A young man made a million marks, lay down on them, and shot himself.
* * * * *
"That woman." ... "I married when I was twenty; I have not drunk a glass of vodka all my life, haven't smoked a single cigarette." ”

“ The dog hates the teacher; they tell it not to bark at him; it looks, does not bark, only whimpers with rage.
* * * * *
Faith is a spiritual faculty; animals have not got it; savages and uncivilized people have merely fear and doubt. Only highly developed natures can have faith. ”

“ Z. goes to a doctor, who examines him and finds that he is suffering from heart disease. Z. abruptly changes his way of life, takes medicine, can only talk about his disease; the whole town knows that he has heart disease and all the doctors, whom he regularly consults, say that he has got heart disease. He does not marry, gives up amateur theatricals, does not drink, and when he walks does so slowly and hardly breathes. Eleven years later he has to go to Moscow and there he consults a specialist. ”

“ Z. is overjoyed, but he can no longer return to a normal life, for he has got accustomed to going to bed early and to walking slowly, and he is bored if he cannot speak of his disease. The only result is that he gets to hate doctors—that is all.
* * * * *
A woman is fascinated not by art, but by the noise made by those who have to do with art.
* * * * *
N., a dramatic critic, has a mistress X., an actress. Her benefit night. The play is rotten, the acting poor, but N. has to praise. He writes briefly: "The play and the leading actress had an enormous success. ”