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One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
Anton Chekhov -
Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels.... They must not be turned into a plaything of one’s mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at.
Anton Chekhov
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At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.
Anton Chekhov -
The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.
Anton Chekhov -
How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.
Anton Chekhov -
Несчастные эгоистичны, злы, несправедливы, жестоки и менее, чем глупцы, способны понимать друг друга. Не соединяет, а разъединяет людей несчастье...
Anton Chekhov -
Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
Anton Chekhov -
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.
Anton Chekhov
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If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.
Anton Chekhov -
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.
Anton Chekhov -
Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields.
Anton Chekhov -
There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.
Anton Chekhov -
How pleasant it is to respect people! When I see books, I am not concerned with how the authors loved or played cards; I see only their marvelous works.
Anton Chekhov -
The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
Anton Chekhov
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One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
Anton Chekhov -
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.
Anton Chekhov -
No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.
Anton Chekhov -
It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
Anton Chekhov -
To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
Anton Chekhov -
The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.
Anton Chekhov
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Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
Anton Chekhov -
I can’t accept 'our nervous age,' since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.
Anton Chekhov -
I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don’t like. No other criterion exists for me.
Anton Chekhov -
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.
Anton Chekhov