Anton Chekhov Quotes
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Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.
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People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
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Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!
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It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.
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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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In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.
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As I shall lie in the grave alone, so in fact I live alone.
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Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
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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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Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.
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'Why do I love him so much, mamma? Why do I feel so sorry for him?' she went on in a quivering voice, and her eyes glistened with tears. 'Who is he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb, but I love him; I love him like a real person. Here he can do nothing, he can't talk, and yet I know what he wants with his little eyes.'
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Eyes-the head’s chief of police. They watch and make mental notes. A blind person is like a city abandoned by the authorities. On sad days they cry. In these carefree times they weep only from tender emotions.
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When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.
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People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.
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I’m in mourning for my life.
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Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.
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There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.