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I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.

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
Artist
Gradual
Nothing
Monk
Like
Liberal
Believer
Conservative
Progress
Freedom
Free

More quotes by 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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[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature 2. total objectivity 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects 4. extreme brevity 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype 6. compassion.
Anton Chekhov
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[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
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I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view - I change it every month - and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
Anton Chekhov
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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!
Anton Chekhov
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This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.
Anton Chekhov
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Not everyone knows how to be silent or to leave in good time. It happens that even people of good breeding fail to notice that their presence provokes in the weary or preoccupied host a feeling akin to hatred, and that this feeling is tensely concealed and covered up with lies.
Anton Chekhov
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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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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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.
Anton Chekhov
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We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.
Anton Chekhov
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Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.
Anton Chekhov
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What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country the people have no morals and the boredom!
Anton Chekhov
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It's been a long time since I've had champagne.
Anton Chekhov
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There are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate.
Anton Chekhov
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The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
Anton Chekhov
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Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.
Anton Chekhov
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A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.
Anton Chekhov
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Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.
Anton Chekhov
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The stupider the peasant, the better the horse understands him.
Anton Chekhov