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I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

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
Exists
Works
Two
Criterion
Like
Criteria
Divide
Divides
Categories
Literary

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

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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.
Anton Chekhov
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What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?
Anton Chekhov
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To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.
Anton Chekhov
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If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
Anton Chekhov
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Who keeps the tavern and serves up the drinks? The peasant. Who squanders and drinks up money belonging to the peasant commune, the school, the church? The peasant. Who would steal from his neighbor, commit arson, and falsely denounce another for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.
Anton Chekhov
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.
Anton Chekhov
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If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.
Anton Chekhov
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In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We wont be there to see it - but its why we live, why we work. Its why we suffer. Were creating it. Thats the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.
Anton Chekhov
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When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself - hence the war with what he does not understand.
Anton Chekhov
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There isn't a Monday that would not cede its place to Tuesday.
Anton Chekhov
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There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.
Anton Chekhov
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To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.
Anton Chekhov
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But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: My work is literature.
Anton Chekhov
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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!
Anton Chekhov
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An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.
Anton Chekhov
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[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.
Anton Chekhov
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I expect I shall be a student to the end of my days.
Anton Chekhov
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I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.
Anton Chekhov
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No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
Anton Chekhov