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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 -
Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
Anton Chekhov
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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 -
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 -
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 -
To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
Anton Chekhov -
Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.
Anton Chekhov -
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.
Anton Chekhov
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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 -
If only one tooth aches, rejoice that not all of them ache.... If your wife betrays you, be glad that she betrayed only you and not the nation.
Anton Chekhov -
People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
Anton Chekhov -
Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
Anton Chekhov -
Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
Anton Chekhov -
Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.
Anton Chekhov
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Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
Anton Chekhov -
You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!
Anton Chekhov -
In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.
Anton Chekhov -
It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.
Anton Chekhov -
I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.
Anton Chekhov -
Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.
Anton Chekhov
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It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others’ expense.
Anton Chekhov -
People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.
Anton Chekhov -
That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
Anton Chekhov -
When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.
Anton Chekhov