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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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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
World
Political
Hero
Marry
Stills
Birth
Description
Change
View
Month
Give
Months
Heroes
Still
Views
Limit
Giving
Religious
Philosophical
Every
Dies
Lack
Love
Speak
Limits
Descriptions

More quotes by 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.
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In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.
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To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist he must abandon the subjective line he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.
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When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'
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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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It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.
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The sea has neither meaning nor pity.
Anton Chekhov
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Man is what he believes.
Anton Chekhov
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The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
Anton Chekhov
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In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger - a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...
Anton Chekhov
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If you cry ''Forward'' you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don't you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?
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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Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.
Anton Chekhov
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It's immoral to steal, but you can take things.
Anton Chekhov
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Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they'll find a means to be happy.
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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Indeed, in Russia there is a terrible poverty of facts, and a terrible abundance of reflections of all sorts.
Anton Chekhov
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When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.
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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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After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, Oh! Life is so hard! and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
Anton Chekhov