Anton Chekhov Quotes

When you're thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that's faith; when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that's science.

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

There is nothing so well known as that we should not expect something for nothing - but we all do and call it Hope.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

The joys we expect are not so bright, nor the troubles so dark as we fancy they will be.

I believed, up to last week, that Adam was somehow coming back. But I wouldn't trade that optimism for anything, because the other option is no fun.

Blessed are those that nought expect, for they shall not be disappointed.

The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had for it.

You always underestimate - rather than be disappointed.

There are perhaps only one or two things in the world which are not far more charming in desire than they are in possession.

Things just seem so much better in theory than in practice.

There is no better moment than this moment, when we're anticipating the actual moment itself. All of the moments that lead up to the actual moment are truly the best moments. Those are the moments that are filled with good times. Those are the moments in which you are able to think that it is going to be perfect, when the moment actually happens. But, the moment is reality, and reality always kinda sucks!

Cynic: an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

... I never will allow myself to form an ideal of any person I desire to see, for disappointment never fails to ensue.

People expect too much. People who expect heaven always fall into hell - that is the law. Expect heaven and hell is certain. Don't expect heaven and there will never be any hell.

He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses

It had been more of a wish, actually, but it sounded better to call it a dream.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.