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Quotes of the Day for 29 January 2005 - Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born at Taganrog, Ukraine on this day in 1860. Russian society was in flux, the serfs were all freed the next year. His father's business failed and the family moved to Moscow where Chekhov was educated. To help pay for medical school he started writing short stories, and became more serious about his writing after his career as a physician started. For health reasons he spent several years in France, indulging his appetite for farce in the theater. His most important work was written in the last decade of his life, plays that he considered comedies with tragic incidents. He was frustrated at the number of productions that presented them as tragedies with light moments. I'm with Chekhov, we're much healthier to look around us and see life as a farce with some bad times to overcome than to see life as a series of problems.

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

If you cry Forward! you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don't you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite?

Comfort and convenience possess a magical power; little by little they suck in even people with strong wills.

The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.

There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you're angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you're asked.

A man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.
     - All from Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860 - 1904

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