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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
Place
Rifle
Must
Rifles
Mean
Loaded
Going
Promises
Make
Promise
Never
Stage
Wrong
Keep
More quotes by Anton Chekhov
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.
Anton Chekhov
[In] death at least there would be one profit it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.
Anton Chekhov
It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.
Anton Chekhov
When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.
Anton Chekhov
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.
Anton Chekhov
When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself - hence the war with what he does not understand.
Anton Chekhov
Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
Anton Chekhov
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.
Anton Chekhov
The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.
Anton Chekhov
If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter
Anton Chekhov
If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.
Anton Chekhov
It's been a long time since I've had champagne.
Anton Chekhov
Do you know, Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, for how many years I shall be read? Seven. Why seven? Bunin asked. Well, Chekhov answered, seven and a half then.
Anton Chekhov
A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.
Anton Chekhov
Even while lying, you'll be believed if you speak with authority.
Anton Chekhov
Man will become better when you show him what he is like.
Anton Chekhov
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
Anton Chekhov
I expect I shall be a student to the end of my days.
Anton Chekhov
I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?
Anton Chekhov
People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.
Anton Chekhov