Anton Chekhov on Knowledge

"People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people."

"It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand."

"Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is."

"It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday."

"Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts."

"Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms."

"I don’t know why one can’t chase two rabbits at the same time, even in the literal sense of those words. If you have the hounds, go ahead and pursue."

"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."

"We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating."

"Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and tortuous to write a bad one."

"Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport."

"Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure."

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

"When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand."

"An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes."