Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Faith is a capacity of the spirit. It is like talent: you have to be born with it.”

— Anton Chekhov

452. “The phlegamtic female is a weepy, bug-eyed, fat, lumpy, fleshy German. She looks like a sack of flour. She is born in order to become a mother-in-law. That is her whole ambition.”

— Anton Chekhov

453. “The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic’s that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.”

— Anton Chekhov

454. “This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and.”

— Anton Chekhov

455. “I went to the Hotel of the Violet Hippopotamus and drank five glasses of good wine.”

— Anton Chekhov

456. “But I write badly. The part of my brain in charge of writing ability refuses to work. My memory has weakened, my thoughts lack consistency, and each time I set them down on paper it seems to me that I’ve lost the intuition of their organic connection, the constructions are monotonous, the phrasing impoverished and timid.”

— Anton Chekhov

457. “Loud voices were heard from upstairs. “Madame Kushkin is in a fit, most likely, or else she has.”

— Anton Chekhov

458. “In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don’t feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger – a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...”

— Anton Chekhov

459. “The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of human beings.”

— Anton Chekhov

460. “In spite of his clumsiness and rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and goodness of heart, always ready to be of use.”

— Anton Chekhov

461. “True happiness is impossible without privacy. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he wanted the privacy denied to an angel.”

— Anton Chekhov

462. “With total rapture and delight he talks about the birds which he can see from his prison window, and which he had never noticed before, when he was a minister. Now of course, after he’s been released, he doesn’t notice the birds anymore, just as beforehand. In the same way you won’t notice Moscow, when you actually live there.”

— Anton Chekhov

463. “It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself.”

— Anton Chekhov

464. “My illness is only that in twenty years I have only found one intelligent man in the whole town, and he is mad.”

— Anton Chekhov

465. “Oh, if only this new, bright life would come sooner, when one could look one’s fate directly and boldly in the eye, be conscious of one’s rightness, be cheerful, free! And this life would come sooner or later!”

— Anton Chekhov

466. “Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people’s altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to justify and conceal one’s own rottenness and moral poverty is only possible for a very vain, base, and nasty creature.”

— Anton Chekhov

467. “There are a great many wicked people in the world,” said Emelyan.”

— Anton Chekhov

468. “She was fond of her comfort.”

— Anton Chekhov

469. “The humane studies of which you speak will only satisfy human thought when, as they advance, they meet the exact sciences and progress side by side with them. Whether they will meet under a new microscope, or in the new monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I do not know, but I expect the Earth will be covered in a crust of ice before it comes to pass.”

— Anton Chekhov

470. “Though what is ‘Romeo and Juliet’ after all?” he added after a short pause. “The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses under which they try to hide its rottenness. Romeo is just the same sort of animal as all the rest of us.”

— Anton Chekhov

471. “You really need to be alone when you are travelling. It’s much more interesting to sit in a coach or in your room with your own thoughts than it is to be with people.”

— Anton Chekhov

472. “Knowledge and evidence. The consumptive and the scrofulous are recognized by their ailments, and the immoral and mad by their acts.”

— Anton Chekhov

473. “There is something mystical in the proud man in the sense in which you use the words. You may be right from your point of view, but, if we look at it simple-mindedly, what room is there for pride? Is there any sense in it, when man is so poorly constructed from the physiological point of view, when the vast majority of us are so gross and stupid and profoundly unhappy? We must give up admiring ourselves. The only thing to do is to work.”

— Anton Chekhov

474. “He had a shaggy black dog whom he called Syntax.”

— Anton Chekhov

475. “The hungry have a grievance against those who have enough, and those who have enough have a grievance against the hungry. Yes... hunger stupefies and maddens a man and makes him savage; hunger is not a potato. When a man is starving he uses bad language, and steals, and may do worse... One must realize that.”

— Anton Chekhov

476. “Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.”

— Anton Chekhov

477. “It seems as though there is something going wrong with me,” she thought from time to time through.”

— Anton Chekhov

478. “He did nothing and knew how to do nothing. He.”

— Anton Chekhov

479. “He is barefooted.”

— Anton Chekhov

480. “No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He was utterly forgotten.”

— Anton Chekhov

481. “One is shy of asking men under sentence what they have been sentenced for; and in the same way it is awkward to ask very rich people what they want so much money for, why they make such a poor use of their wealth, why they don’t give it up, even when they see in it their unhappiness; and if they begin a conversation about it themselves, it is usually embarrassing, awkward, and long.”

— Anton Chekhov

482. “Only echoes answer me.”

— Anton Chekhov

483. “And therefore I should be very desirous to be united in the bonds of Hymen.”

— Anton Chekhov

484. “For a crippled man like me, personal happiness was possible only in dreams.”

— Anton Chekhov

485. “A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!”

— Anton Chekhov

486. “The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding each other.”

— Anton Chekhov

487. “He told lies with the same relish with which he ate herring and drank.”

— Anton Chekhov

488. “And in this way I have, during the years I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine situations, to the great mortification of my father, the architect of our town. I have served in various departments, but all these nine jobs have been as alike as one drop of water is to another: I had to sit, write, listen to rude or stupid observations, and go on doing so till I was dismissed.”

— Anton Chekhov

489. “Your insincerity is natural and in the order of things. If people agreed together and suddenly became sincere, everything would go to the devil.”

— Anton Chekhov

490. “Nobody asks her not to understand! It’s a lesson for these foreigners!”

— Anton Chekhov

491. “Why cannot you look calmly at a woman unless she is yours?”

— Anton Chekhov

492. “As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy.”

— Anton Chekhov

493. “His cheeks, his eyes, his chest, his body, all of him was so well fed, so loathsome and repellent!”

— Anton Chekhov

494. “What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding?”

— Anton Chekhov

495. “Well, that’s not at all clerical!” thought Kunin, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously. “What is it, priestly greed or childishness?”

— Anton Chekhov

496. “And how awful it is not to have any opinions!”

— Anton Chekhov

497. “It is my opinion that every woman can be a writer.”

— Anton Chekhov

498. “X. and Z., very well educated and of radical views, married. In the evening they talked together pleasantly, then quarreled, then came to blows. In the morning both are ashamed and surprised, they think it must have been the result of some exceptional state of their nerves. Next night again a quarrel and blows. And so every night until at last they realize that they are not at all educated, but savage, just like the majority of people.”

— Anton Chekhov

499. “Vices which are punished by our legal code had not prevented Diogenes from being a philosopher and a teacher. Caesar and Cicero were profligates and at the same time great men. Cato in his old age married a young girl, and yet he was regarded as a great ascetic and a pillar of morality.”

— Anton Chekhov

500. “A journal like a poem or a painting must be the product of a single mind and reflect a single will.”

— Anton Chekhov