"Indeed, in Russia there is a terrible poverty of facts, and a terrible abundance of reflections of all sorts."
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Quote collection
Anton Chekhov quotes (page 19 of 22)
433 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven."
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"If you fear loneliness, then don't get married."
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"A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious."
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"Solomon made a big mistake when he asked for wisdom."
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"Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous."
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"Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison."
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"The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it."
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"If one wants to lead a good life, A HUMAN LIFE, one must work."
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"You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!"
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"To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!"
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"Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems" come fromsuch goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner."
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"I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written."
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"My mistress has come home; at last I've seen her. Now I'm ready to die."
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"Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imageryYou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author."
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"It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life."
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"I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student."
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"I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage."
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"I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks."
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"I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one."
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