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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
Greater
Purpose
Happiness
Nothing
Something
Wiser
Life
Aim
Meaning
Personal

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Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
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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.
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I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.
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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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Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.
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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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No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
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That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
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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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A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.
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The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.
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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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You look boldly ahead isn't it only that you don't see or divine anything terrible in the future because life is still hidden from your young eyes.
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It's not a matter of old or new forms a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.
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Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.
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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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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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When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.
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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.
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Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something.
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