Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
Faust, First Part

“You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.”

Surgery

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

AZEMSTVO HOSPITAL. In the absence of the doctor, who has gone off to get married, the patients are received by his assistant, the feldscher Kuryatin, a stout man of about forty, whose face wears an expression of amiability and a sense of duty. He is dressed in a shabby pongee jacket, frayed woolen trousers, and between the index and middle fingers of his left hand carries a cigar that gives off a stench.

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