Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860 - 1904
Born: 29 January 1860, Taganrog, Ukraine, Russian Empire
Died: 15 July 1904, Badenweiler, Baden-Württemberg, German Empire
When Chekhov was born, 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. He originally wrote short stories to help pay for medical school, but he became even 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.
Biography from Wikipedia and Authors' Calendar
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov quotes:
Quotes found : 24 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 2) 1 2 Next
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- A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.
- A man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.
- Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
- Comfort and convenience possess a magical power; little by little they suck in even people with strong wills.
- For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.
- He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.
- If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.
- 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?
- If you want to work on your art, work on your life.
- 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.
- Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.
- It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn't understand.
- Man is what he believes.
- Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.
- Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
Quotes found : 24 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 2) 1 2 Next
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