Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “It’s painful listening to the clowning of the unfortunate or the dying.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

457. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

466. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

468. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

470. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

475. “We can’t make her see anything, Pyotr Alexandritch! We are simply done. We talk of one thing and she talks of something else.”

— Anton Chekhov

476. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

485. “Only echoes answer me.”

— Anton Chekhov

486. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

491. “He is barefooted.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

494. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

499. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov