Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Strange indecision!”

— Anton Chekhov

452. “It’s painful listening to the clowning of the unfortunate or the dying.”

— Anton Chekhov

453. “He keeps going, going, going on; his people groan and fall one after the other, but he keeps on going, going and in the end, perishes himself, but still remains the despot and tsar of the desert because the cross over his grave is visible to caravans thirty-forty miles away and reigns over the wasteland.”

— Anton Chekhov

454. “As a good actor reflects in himself the movements and voice of others, so Vassilyev could reflect in his soul the sufferings of others. When he saw tears, he wept; beside a sick.”

— Anton Chekhov

455. “If Iona’s heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight...”

— Anton Chekhov

456. “Only echoes answer me.”

— Anton Chekhov

457. “THE Superintendent said to me: “I only keep you out of regard for your worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago.” I replied to him: “You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming that I am capable of flying.”

— Anton Chekhov

458. “His soul is still hovering here, near his body,” says the young man. “It does not depart from the body for three days.”

— Anton Chekhov

459. “Don’t forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.”

— Anton Chekhov

460. “The chance you give the wrong guy who is run across with you at the right time, unless you don’t give a chance the right guy who is run across with you at the wrong time, only you will always be upset.”

— Anton Chekhov

461. “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

462. “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

463. “There was anything else, but not love.”

— Anton Chekhov

464. “The aim of fiction is honest and absolute truth.”

— Anton Chekhov

465. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

470. “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

471. “I shall renounce it all beforehand.”

— Anton Chekhov

472. “Within a year Ivan Dmitritch was completely forgotten in the town, and his books, heaped up by his landlady in a sledge in the shed, were pulled to pieces by boys.”

— Anton Chekhov

473. “Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with her hand.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

476. “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

477. “Faith is a capacity of the spirit. It is like talent: you have to be born with it.”

— Anton Chekhov

478. “Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most glaring objects.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

480. “Why does this forever gone, irretrievable time, why does it seem brighter, more festive and rich, than it was in reality?”

— Anton Chekhov

481. “In this town to know three languages is an unnecessary luxury. It’s not even a luxury, but a sort of unnecessary addition, like a sixth finger. We have a great deal of superfluous knowledge.”

— Anton Chekhov

482. “Cuando se piensa en comida, se nota un cierto alivio en el alma.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

484. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

486. “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

487. “Lonely people read a great deal, but say little and hear little.”

— Anton Chekhov

488. “What aristocratic writers are given by nature for nothing, commoners acquire at the cost of their youth.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

490. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

492. “Podtyagin considers whether to take offence or not – and decides to take offence.”

— Anton Chekhov

493. “But when I walk by the peasants’ woods which I have saved from cutting down, or when I hear the rustling of the young copse planted by my own hands, I realise that the climate is to some extent in my power, and that if in a thousand years man is to be happy I too shall have had some small hand in it.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

495. “So had begun and had ended a sincere effort to be of public service on the part of a well-intentioned but unreflecting and over-comfortable.”

— Anton Chekhov

496. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

498. “How fortunate Buddha, Mahomed, and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not cure them of their ecstasy and their inspiration,” said Kovrin. “If Mahomed had taken bromide for his nerves, had worked only two hours out of the twenty-four, and had drunk milk, that remarkable man would have left no more trace after him than his dog. Doctors and kind relations will succeed in stupefying mankind, in making mediocrity pass for genius and in bringing civilisation to ruin.”

— Anton Chekhov

499. “What we have, we do not treasure,” and what’s more we do not even love it.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov