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.
Brevity is the sister of talent.
Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
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.
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
Indifference is a paralysis of soul.
By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress.
A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.
If only one tooth aches, rejoice that not all of them ache.... If your wife betrays you, be glad that she betrayed only you and not the nation. [A Russian version of “the glass is half-full”.]
When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.
If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
Any idiot can face a crisis; it is the day-to-day living that wears you out.
Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
A nice person should feel ashamed even before a dog.
I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it’s tobacco, then let it be tobacco.
There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalms and in the Wisdom of Solomon.
Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.
It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
You ask “What is life?” That is the same as asking “What is a carrot?” A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more.
People should be beautiful in every way — in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts and in their innermost selves.
He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.
It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.
About Chekhov:
This great kindness pervades Chekhov’s literary work, but it is not a matter of program or of literary message with him, but simply the natural coloration of his talent.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Worse than Shakespeare.
— Leo Tolstoy on Chekhov's plays.
16 comments:
Where do I begin?
Or end?
You may begin in the middle and work your way outward.
For instance, what do you think he meant when he said, "If you don't want to be lonely, never marry." My mom thinks Chekhov loved someone whom he couldn't marry and married someone whom he had to marry according to some social something or other.
I think Chekhov meant that 80% of marriages end up with both people hating each other or at least becoming cold and distant to the point that someone is more lonely with his wife than if he were alone.
My older sister thinks that Chekhov just liked to make paradoxical statements. Or in fact this wasn't an opinion of Anton Pavlovich, but of one of this characters.
No?
First of all, you're assuming that loneliness is a bad thing.
I am not. Chekhov certainly didn't. He said something like: "As I shall lie in the grave alone, so in fact I live alone." I think he was quite happy with the status quo.
He also said something like: "Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be."
Chekhov was a true Russian philosopher. Not a crazy nutcase like Dostoyevsky. Nor a philosopher in the clouds like Tolstoy. Not a bitter cynic like Bulgakov. But a realist, with a touch of nostalgia and refinement.
You know the names of too many Russian philosophers for your own good.
I owe everything I am today to Russian classical literature and cabbage.
Or, as Chekhov would put it, "When a person hasn’t in him that which is higher and stronger than all external influences, it is enough for him to catch a good cold in order to lose his equilibrium and begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog’s bark in every sound."
I actually like cabbage soup.
What about Ukrainian borsch? Not the Polish version with beats, chv"sh. But the real, red stuff. Spicy, with cabbage and tomatoes. And other things. Sometimes meat (a chink of beef on a bone). Sometimes sour cream. With garlic dipped in salt. Sometimes rubbed on a piece of toasted rye bread.
How's that instead of the kerosene lamp?
Like this (ignore the presence of basar and chalav at the same time). Or this.
What's with the iPhone?
It's good for a husband to talk sometimes to his wife.
Within limits. Remember what it says in ethics of the fathers.
It says you shouldn't discuss a sicho with your wife, but a ma'amor is fine.
Nu, apple is all about maamarim.
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