Quote

One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.

Anton Chekhov

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Anton Chekhov
Age: 44 †
Born: 1860
Born: January 1
Died: 1904
Died: January 1
Author
Dramaturge
Journalist
Novelist
Physician
Playwright
Prosaist
Satirist
Writer
Tahanroh
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Antón Pávlovič Čéhov
Antón Pávlovich Chékhov
Chekhov
Must
Rifles
Mean
Loaded
Going
Promises
Make
Promise
Never
Stage
Wrong
Keep
Place
Rifle

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

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All saints have past and all sinners have a future.
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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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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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Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.
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Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.
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Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.
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An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.
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I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.
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I can't accept our nervous age, since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.
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Indeed, in Russia there is a terrible poverty of facts, and a terrible abundance of reflections of all sorts.
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Man will become better when you show him what he is like.
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You look boldly ahead isn't it only that you don't see or divine anything terrible in the future because life is still hidden from your young eyes.
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It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.
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In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We wont be there to see it - but its why we live, why we work. Its why we suffer. Were creating it. Thats the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.
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Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.
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Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.
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Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.
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Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
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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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But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: My work is literature.
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