"My holy of holies is the human body."
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Quote collection
Anton Chekhov quotes (page 18 of 22)
433 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal."
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"When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief."
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"If you can't distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn't undertake philanthropic work."
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"we all have too many wheels, screws and valves to judge each other on first impressions or one or two pointers. I don't understand you, you don't understand me and we don't understand ourselves."
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"There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!"
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"And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!"
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"Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else's opinion and without the fear of hindering one another."
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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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"The more cultured a man, the less fortunate he is."
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"The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth."
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"A man can deceive his fiancee or his mistress as much as he likes and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher. But a daughter is a different matter."
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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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"I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch."
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"A person loves to talk about his illnesses although that is the least interesting part of his life."
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"If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go."
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"Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man."
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"It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest."
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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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"Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!"
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