Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Why cannot you look calmly at a woman unless she is yours?”

— Anton Chekhov

452. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

454. “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

455. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

458. “Faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse still – mere waste of time and nothing more.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

460. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

462. “It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man.”

— Anton Chekhov

463. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

470. “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

471. “When a person expends the least possible amount of energy on a certain act, that is grace.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

473. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

478. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

480. “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

481. “Purity and virtue scarcely differ from vice, if they’re not free of malice.”

— Anton Chekhov

482. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

484. “The State is not God. It has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should so desire.”

— Anton Chekhov

485. “And you know that anyone who at least once in his life has caught a perch or seen blackbirds migrating in the fall, when they rush in flocks over the village on clear, cool days, is no longer a townsman, and will be drawn towards freedom till his dying day.”

— Anton Chekhov

486. “And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.”

— Anton Chekhov

487. “I shall renounce it all beforehand.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

490. “An idle life cannot be pure.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

492. “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

493. “We attach no value to our own opinion even when it is wise, but tremble before the opinion of all sorts of stupid people.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

495. “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

496. “She was fond of her comfort.”

— Anton Chekhov

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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