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Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

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
Everything
Higher
Humans
Beauty
Think
Forget
Thinking
Purpose
Life
Nature
Beautiful
Purposes
Earth
Dignity
Human
Except

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

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You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.
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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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Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?
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Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.
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People's destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring—they're all alike, and they're all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you—you're one in a million. You're happy—
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The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
Anton Chekhov
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God's world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!
Anton Chekhov
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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
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.
Anton Chekhov
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To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.
Anton Chekhov
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Never bring a cannon on stage in Act I unless you intend to fire it by the last act.
Anton Chekhov
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My holy of holies is the human body.
Anton Chekhov
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When one sees one of the romantic creatures before him he imagines he is looking at some holy being, so wonderful that its one breath could dissolve him in a sea of a thousand charms and delights but if one looks into the soul -- it's nothing but a common crocodile.
Anton Chekhov
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I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
Anton Chekhov
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How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
Anton Chekhov
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Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.
Anton Chekhov
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To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
Anton Chekhov
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If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure
Anton Chekhov
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All the great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ignorant and as indelicate as generals, because they feel secure of impunity.
Anton Chekhov