Diamonds
“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Art is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.
If you want to work on your art, work on your life.
Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.
Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
Even in Siberia there is happiness.
For God's sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch.
The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
Man will become better when you show him what he is like.
These people have learned not from books, but in the woods, in the fields, on the riverbank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
“Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.”
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.
We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.”
-Anton Chekhov