Quote

The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness if it issuesnot from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.

Anton Chekhov

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anton Chekhov
Age: 44 †
Born: 1860
Born: January 1
Died: 1904
Died: January 1
Author
Dramaturge
Journalist
Novelist
Physician
Playwright
Prosaist
Satirist
Writer
Tahanroh
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Antón Pávlovič Čéhov
Antón Pávlovich Chékhov
Chekhov
Happiness
Consideration
Desire
Necessity
Helping
Charity
Soul
Serve
Without
Fail
Must
Failing
Requisite
Thing
Personal
Considerations
Good
Common
Theoretical

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

Image
I can't accept our nervous age, since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.
Anton Chekhov
Image
What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won't seem important at all.
Anton Chekhov
Image
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Anton Chekhov
Image
Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
Anton Chekhov
Image
Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else's opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.
Anton Chekhov
Image
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.
Anton Chekhov
Image
We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.
Anton Chekhov
Image
Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.
Anton Chekhov
Image
It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
Anton Chekhov
Image
Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.
Anton Chekhov
Image
Man will become better when you show him what he is like.
Anton Chekhov
Image
In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will... Each hour is precious.
Anton Chekhov
Image
Writers are as jealous as pigeons.
Anton Chekhov
Image
Silence accompanies the most significant expressions of happiness and unhappiness: those in love understand one another best when silent, while the most heated and impassioned speech at a graveside touches only outsiders, but seems cold and inconsequential to the widow and children of the deceased.
Anton Chekhov
Image
When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.
Anton Chekhov
Image
The sea has neither meaning nor pity.
Anton Chekhov
Image
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.
Anton Chekhov
Image
[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature 2. total objectivity 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects 4. extreme brevity 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype 6. compassion.
Anton Chekhov
Image
The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.
Anton Chekhov
Image
It's immoral to steal, but you can take things.
Anton Chekhov