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When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

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
Done
Cynicism
Real
Glass
Life
Glasses
Drunk
Intoxicate
Already
Outdo
Literature
Barrel
Someone
Barrels
Whole
Drunkenness

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Instructing in cures, therapists always recommend that each case be individualized. If this advice is followed, one becomes persuaded that those means recommended in textbooks as the best, means perfectly appropriate for the template case, turn out to be completely unsuitable in individual cases.
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Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else's opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.
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Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
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It's even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.
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It's easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.
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He who doesn't know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others' successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs.
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In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.
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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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One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.
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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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Let the things that happen on the stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.
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When a person hasn't in him that which is higher and stronger than all external influences, it is enough for him to catch a good cold in order to lose his equilibrium and begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog's bark in every sound.
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That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
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Life is a vexatious trap when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
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What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?
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It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.
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There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table what is national is no longer science.
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If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.
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Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.
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Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
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