Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of human beings.”

— Anton Chekhov

452. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

458. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

460. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

462. “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

463. “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

464. “There is no wall so solid that a breach cannot be made in it, but our modern lovers, from what I know of them, are too timid, inert, lazy and mistrustful, and resign themselves too quickly to the thought that they are failures, that life has cheated them in love. Instead of fighting, they merely criticize the world for its pettiness, forgetting that their very criticism gradually dwindles down to petty fault-finding.”

— Anton Chekhov

465. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

468. “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

469. “People say that a person needs six feet of earth. But in fact it’s a corpse that needs six feet of earth, not a person. People don’t need six feet of earth, or even a house in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature in its entirety, so they can have the space to express all the capacities and particularities of their free spirit.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

472. “Love must be plucked out the moment it springs up in the heart.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

474. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

476. “God alone knows what a man’s real calling is.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

482. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

484. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

486. “If I were to be asked: What now constitutes the main and fundamental feature of your existence? I would answer: Insomnia.”

— Anton Chekhov

487. “I made my way to the house and was met by a fat dog with reddish hair that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but was too lazy.”

— Anton Chekhov

488. “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

489. “Such women imagine that they will be in love for ever, and abandon themselves with tragic intensity.”

— Anton Chekhov

490. “I shall renounce it all beforehand.”

— Anton Chekhov

491. “Though my fortune is not large, yet I am in a position to support a beloved being and children at my side.”

— 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. “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

495. “She was fond of her comfort.”

— Anton Chekhov

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

499. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov