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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
Literary
Exists
Works
Criterion
Two
Criteria
Like
Divide
Divides
Categories

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If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure
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I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view - I change it every month - and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
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I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.
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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.
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If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.
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Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one's dignity.
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I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student.
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Only entropy comes easy.
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When one sees one of the romantic creatures before him he imagines he is looking at some holy being, so wonderful that its one breath could dissolve him in a sea of a thousand charms and delights but if one looks into the soul -- it's nothing but a common crocodile.
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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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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 tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.
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If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.
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..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.
Anton Chekhov
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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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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Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.
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.
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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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He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
Anton Chekhov