"You will not become a saint through other people's sins."
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Quote collection
Anton Chekhov quotes (page 6 of 22)
433 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, won't in my sky every day..."
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"One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work."
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"..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing."
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"Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport."
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"They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death."
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"The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings."
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"People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them."
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"Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress."
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"And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life."
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"The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected."
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"I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses."
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"In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won"t be there to see it - but it"s why we live, why we work. It"s why we suffer. We"re creating it. That"s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal."
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"It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it."
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"We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of."
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"Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are."
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"If you want to work on your art, work on your life."
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"There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you're angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you're asked."
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"Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things."
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"To regard one's immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth."
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