After us, they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

— Anton Chekhov

A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.

— Anton Chekhov

A man and a woman marry because both of them don't know what to do with themselves.

— Anton Chekhov

A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or gray, but I no longer live. Psychiatry tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterward assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death.

— Anton Chekhov

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life.

— Anton Chekhov

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

— Anton Chekhov

And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country.

— Anton Chekhov

Anna Petrov: Do you know what, Kola? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did... You stay in, we'll laugh and drink fruit liqueur, and we'll drive away your depression in a flash. I'll sing if you like. Or else let's go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you'll tell me about your depression... You have such suffering eyes. I'll look into them and cry, and we'll both feel better.

— Anton Chekhov