If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

Anton Chekhov

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

Anton Chekhov

best-effort police criticism

The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy...

Anton Chekhov

greed happiness thinking

Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.

Anton Chekhov

aptitude spirit facts

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious

Anton Chekhov

educated religious men

When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life.

Anton Chekhov

mourning black said

I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

Anton Chekhov

criteria categories two

Love, respect, and friendship do unite a people as well as a common hatred does.

Anton Chekhov

hatred doe people

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

Anton Chekhov

psychology essentials character

Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one's eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.

Anton Chekhov

dream happiness lying

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Anton Chekhov

blank-slates insight men

No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.

Anton Chekhov

psychology fake-people doe

And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.

Anton Chekhov

gray first-time firsts

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.

Anton Chekhov

soul life school

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

Anton Chekhov

vapid mediocrity useless

Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.

Anton Chekhov

grumbling miscarriage art

In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.

Anton Chekhov

remains permanent spirit

There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

Anton Chekhov

numbers trying people

When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries.

Anton Chekhov

cash each-day world

In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won"t be there to see it - but it"s why we live, why we work. It"s why we suffer. We"re creating it. That"s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.

Anton Chekhov

creating two people

The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.

Anton Chekhov

silence unhappy men