Chekhov's Quotes
"I am afraid of those who will look for tendenciousness between the
lines and who are determined to see me either as a liberal or a conservative.
I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, neither a gradualist nor a monk
nor an indifferentist.
I would like to be nothing more than a free artist, and I regret that God did
not give me the gift to be one. I hate falseness and coercion in all their
forms . . . . Pharisaism, stupidity and arbitrariness reign not merely in
merchants' houses and police stations: I see them in science, in literature,
among the young.
That is why I have no particular passion for either policemen or butchers or
scientists or writers or the young. I consider brand-names and labels a prejudice.
My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration,
love, and absolute freedom, freedom from force and falseness in whatever form
they express themselves. That's the platform I'd subscribe to if I were a great
artist."
You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.
To judge between good and bad, between successful and unsuccessful
would take the eye of a god.
The university brings out all abilities including incapability.
A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.
He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscious and his sense
of duty.
When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it
can't be cured.
One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without
making a mistake.
The more refined one is, the more unhappy.
Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living
that wears you out.
If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.
Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common
hatred for something.
The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps
it is partly for that reason that civilised man is so nervously anxious
that personal privacy should be respected.
No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand....
Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
...only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write
foolish things.
If you cry "forward," you must without fail make plain in what
direction to go.
