Quote

Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.

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
Life
Daring
Unknown
Road
Difficult
Firsts
First
Always
Garde
Time
Avant

More quotes by 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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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.
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Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one's dignity.
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Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that all of our problems come fromsuch goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.
Anton Chekhov
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Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
Anton Chekhov
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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—
Anton Chekhov
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The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.
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Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
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My holy of holies is the human body.
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Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.
Anton Chekhov
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There are people whom even children's literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.
Anton Chekhov
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.
Anton Chekhov
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Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.
Anton Chekhov
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A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.
Anton Chekhov
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Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one.
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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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.
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Only one who loves can remember so well.
Anton Chekhov
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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