Anton Chekhov

[Nevero]

[Radio]

old gary oldman!

SLI

[silke]

his sss page has 35 LII votes with which I concur, sp/so 9w1. He reminds me of a friend who's likely LII e9.

quotes:

"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."

"An enormously vast field lies between “God exists” and “there is no God.” The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little."

"The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy."

"I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them." ("democratic"?)

"Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one’s dignity."

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language."

"I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura."

"We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."

"The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles."

"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."

"All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still."

"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."

"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."

"Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games."

"When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace."

"There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined."

"Worse than Shakespeare." - Leo Tolstoy on Chekhov's plays.

[rcp]

Never read him, but descriptions of his writing as open-ended, somewhat ambiguous and random (as in not moving in a clear direction, but starting and stopping abruptly) seems Alpha & -Ti. Also he VIs LII quite heavily.