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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.

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
Latter
Life
Somehow
Prison
Asked
Courses
Course
Better
Chose
Live
Execution

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A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.
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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.
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Man is what he believes.
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I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
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To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!
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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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It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.
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If you cry ''Forward'' you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don't you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?
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Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
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Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.
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Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me.
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It's not a matter of old or new forms a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.
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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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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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It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.
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These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
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People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
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Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
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A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.
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No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
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