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If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.

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
Personal
Greater
Purpose
Happiness
Nothing
Something
Wiser
Life
Aim
Meaning

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The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.
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Flies purify the air, and plays - the morals.
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Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.
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There are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate.
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Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.
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A man can deceive his fiancee or his mistress as much as he likes and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher. But a daughter is a different matter.
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A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.
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The sea has neither meaning nor pity.
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Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.
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No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
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My holy of holies is the human body.
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Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
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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.
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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.
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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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It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.
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I am writing a play which I probably will not finish until the end of November. I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, four acts, a landscape (view of the lake), lots of talk on literature, little action and tons of love.
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Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.
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The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
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There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.
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