"In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!"
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Quote collection
Anton Chekhov quotes (page 11 of 22)
433 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms."
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"To advise is not to compel."
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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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"In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn't yetappeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father."
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"If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall."
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"I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more."
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"All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still."
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"To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones."
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"It is the writer's business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment."
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"By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress."
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"In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger - a stranger... A stranger, and lonely..."
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"Advertising is the very essence of democracy."
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"Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable."
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"Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty."
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"The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can't return even if it wants to."
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"The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles."
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"If you ever have need of my life, come and take it."
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"I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost."
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"The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible."
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