“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

“When one has no real life, one lives by mirages.”

“If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”

Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:

1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable … They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don’t make a scandal when they leave. (…)

2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. (…)

3) They respect other people’s property, and therefore pay their debts.

4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don’t tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don’t put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don’t show off to impress their juniors. (…)

5) They don’t run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don’t play on other people’s heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted … that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it’s vulgar, old hat and false. (…)

6) They are not vain. They don’t waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar … They regard prases like ‘I am a representative of the Press!!’ — the sort of thing one only hears from [very minor journalists] — as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing’s work they don’t pass it off as if it were 100 roubles’ by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don’t boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren’t allowed in (…) True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight … As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. (…)

7) If they do possess talent, they value it … They take pride in it … they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others] rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. (…)

8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility … Civilized people don’t simply obey their baser instincts … they require mens sana in corpore sano.

And so on. That’s what civilized people are like … Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings.

“Everything I know about men, I learned from me”

There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble. Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out. Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it. Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts. It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I’ve never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it’ll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it’ll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.

“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.”

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything — except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity. People should be beautiful in every way – in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves. Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.

I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind. If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.

… And with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all. Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be. To fear love is to fear life, and those whose fear life are already three parts dead…

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

“We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams.”

“If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”

“Even in Siberia there is happiness.”

***

~Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time.

Excerpts from Notebook of Anton Chekhov, Short Stories by Anton Chekhov: About Truth, Freedom, Happiness, and Love, Letter to Nikolay Chekhov

©Excellence the 2023