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The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.

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
Simple
Solution
Problem
Attempt
Complexes
Complex
Cleverly
Simplicity
Unusually
Solve
Rendering
Solutions
Thereby
Questions
Simplest

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A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.
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I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.
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My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
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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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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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If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.
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When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'
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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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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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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.
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Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
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Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.
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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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The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. 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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Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.
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If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure
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Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one's eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.
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Eyes - the head's chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.
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Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
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