Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “An idle life cannot be pure.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

456. “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

457. “I hope that in the next world I shall be able to look back upon this life and say: Those were beautiful dreams.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

459. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

461. “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

462. “She was fond of her comfort.”

— Anton Chekhov

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

467. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

469. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

473. “Without solitude true happiness was impossible. The fallen angel was faithless to God probably only because he longed for solitude, which angles knew not.”

— Anton Chekhov

474. “He is barefooted.”

— Anton Chekhov

475. “No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He was utterly forgotten.”

— Anton Chekhov

476. “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

477. “Only echoes answer me.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

480. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

490. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

493. “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

494. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

498. “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

499. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov