The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov

I am a well-read man, I have studied various remarkable books, but I cannot make out the trend of my preferences. I don't know whether I should live or l, speaking bluntly, shoot myself. But I always carry a revolver in my pocket, just in case.

She loves you — you like her. And I can't make out why you seem to fight shy of each other. I can't understand it!

If very many cures are suggested for any illness, that means it is incurable.

These clever people are all so stupid — there's no one to talk to.

Mankind marches forward, perfecting itself. All that we find unattainable now will some day be near and clear; but we must work, we must do our utmost to help those who seek after truth.

To avoid everything petty, everything illusory, everything that prevents us from being free and happy, that is the whole meaning and purpose of our life.

A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.

Why should I be ashamed to own it? I love him, that's plain. I love him. It's like a millstone tied round my neck, it's dragging me down to the bottom, but I love my stone and can't live without it.

— What is the noisy world to me? Oh, what are friends and foes?... How sweet it is to play a mandolin!
— That's a guitar, not a mandolin.
— To one mad with live it is a mandolin.

They are all serious, and all wear solemn faces; they discuss important subjects and air their theories; but meanwhile workers eat abominably and sleep in filth and stuffiness without pillows. There are as many as forty of them sleeping in one room and bugs everywhere, and the stench and damp and moral impurity. It's plain that all our clever talk is only meant to distract our attention and other people's.

It is so obvious that to live in the present, we must first redeem the past, and have done with it; and it is only by suffering that we can redeem it, by strenuous, unremitting toil.

When I work for hours without getting tired, I am easy in my mind and I seem to know why I exist. But God alone knows what most of the people in Russia were born for.

Yes, we are at least two hundred years behind the times. We have achieved nothing at all as yet; we have no attitude towards the past; we only philosophise, complain of boredom, or drink vodka.

If you run with the pack, bark or no, but wag your tail.

I quite appreciate my destiny; every day some misfortune happens to me, and I have long since grown accustomed to it, and face my fortune with a smile.

And what does it mean, to die? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.