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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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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
Would
Like
Regret
Strength
Free
Artist
Given
Else
Nothing

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Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
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You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly.
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At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.
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There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.
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A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.
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The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.
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We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.
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And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!
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My love is like a stone tied round my neck it's dragging me down to the bottom but I love my stone. I can't live without it.
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If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.
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Even while lying, you'll be believed if you speak with authority.
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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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Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.
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It's immoral to steal, but you can take things.
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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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When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.
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That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
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In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because--I don't know why.
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Only one who loves can remember so well.
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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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