Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it’s extremely difficult to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people. I.”

— Anton Chekhov

452. “Why cannot you look calmly at a woman unless she is yours? Because, the doctor was right, you are all possessed by a devil of destruction; you have no mercy on the woods or the birds or on women or on one another.”

— Anton Chekhov

453. “But is eternal truth of use to man and within his reach, if there is no eternal life?” “There is eternal life,” said the monk.”

— Anton Chekhov

454. “I am a book-worm and a scholar, and am unfamiliar with practical affairs.”

— Anton Chekhov

455. “Strange indecision!”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

457. “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

458. “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

459. “Only echoes answer me.”

— Anton Chekhov

460. “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

461. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

463. “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

464. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

466. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

469. “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

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. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “I shall renounce it all beforehand.”

— Anton Chekhov

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

485. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

488. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

490. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

497. “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

498. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

500. “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