Anton Chekhov Quotes
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All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.
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Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.
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It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.
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We fret ourselves to reform life, in order that posterity may be happy, and posterity will say as usual: 'In the past it used to be better, the present is worse than the past.'
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Ognev recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.
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Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
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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.
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By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto-that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. ... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.
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Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.
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'Grigory Petrovitch, let us weep, let us weep with joy!' he said in a thin voice, and then at once burst out laughing in a loud bass guffaw. 'Ho-ho-ho! This is a fine daughter-in-law for you too! Everything is in its place in her; all runs smoothly, no creaking, the mechanism works well, lots of screws in it.'
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It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.
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The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
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It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.
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Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a lie.
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To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
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All Russia is our orchard.
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One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
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She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter.
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What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.
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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.
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Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
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Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
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A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.
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People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.