Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.”

— Anton Chekhov

Featured in: Knowledge Quotes, Practice Quotes, Technology Quotes

2. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

— Anton Chekhov

Featured in: Interesting Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Quotes About Writing, Storytelling Quotes, Short Deep Quotes

3. “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”

— Anton Chekhov

Featured in: Happiness Quotes, Positivity Quotes, Gratitude Quotes, Summer Quotes

4. “Man is what he believes.”

— Anton Chekhov

5. “All saints have pasts and all sinners have a future.”

— Anton Chekhov

6. “Only entropy comes easy.”

— Anton Chekhov

7. “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”

— Anton Chekhov

8. “What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.”

— Anton Chekhov

9. “If you fear loneliness, then don’t get married.”

— Anton Chekhov

Featured in: Loneliness Quotes

10. “You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.”

— Anton Chekhov

11. “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.”

— Anton Chekhov

12. “Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.”

— Anton Chekhov

13. “The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.”

— Anton Chekhov

14. “Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it’s unimaginable.”

— Anton Chekhov

15. “People should be beautiful in every way – in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.”

— Anton Chekhov

16. “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

— Anton Chekhov

17. “I’ve never been in love. I’ve dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.”

— Anton Chekhov

18. “Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.”

— Anton Chekhov

19. “Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”

— Anton Chekhov

Featured in: Respect Quotes

20. “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”

— Anton Chekhov

21. “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.”

— Anton Chekhov

22. “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure.”

— Anton Chekhov

23. “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.”

— Anton Chekhov

24. “Advertising is the very essence of democracy.”

— Anton Chekhov

25. “Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.”

— Anton Chekhov

26. “It’s very hard, feeling that you’re no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.”

— Anton Chekhov

27. “If there’s a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must fire the gun by act three, scene two. If you fire a gun in act three, scene two, you must see the gun on the wall in act one, scene one.”

— Anton Chekhov

28. “Life has gone by as if I never lived.”

— Anton Chekhov

29. “Dear sweet unforgettable childhood.”

— Anton Chekhov

30. “I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.”

— Anton Chekhov

31. “People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.”

— Anton Chekhov

32. “I’m the seagull. No, that’s not it. I’m an actress. That’s it.”

— Anton Chekhov

33. “Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.”

— Anton Chekhov

34. “The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.”

— Anton Chekhov

35. “There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments, but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.”

— Anton Chekhov

36. “When a woman isn’t beautiful, people always say, ‘You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.’”

— Anton Chekhov

37. “Everyone has the same God; only people differ.”

— Anton Chekhov

38. “There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.”

— Anton Chekhov

39. “One must speak about serious things seriously.”

— Anton Chekhov

40. “Women can’t forgive failure.”

— Anton Chekhov

41. “There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.”

— Anton Chekhov

42. “You ask me what life is. That’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more to know.”

— Anton Chekhov

43. “We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.”

— Anton Chekhov

44. “Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.”

— Anton Chekhov

45. “The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.”

— Anton Chekhov

46. “Write only of what is important and eternal.”

— Anton Chekhov

47. “In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.”

— Anton Chekhov

48. “Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.”

— Anton Chekhov

49. “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.”

— Anton Chekhov

50. “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.”

— Anton Chekhov