Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

453. “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

454. “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

455. “The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic’s that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.”

— Anton Chekhov

456. “Free and profound thought, which strives towards the comprehension of life, and a complete scorn for the foolish vanity of the world – man has never known anything higher than these two blessings.”

— Anton Chekhov

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

461. “Strange indecision!”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

463. “He keeps going, going, going on; his people groan and fall one after the other, but he keeps on going, going and in the end, perishes himself, but still remains the despot and tsar of the desert because the cross over his grave is visible to caravans thirty-forty miles away and reigns over the wasteland.”

— Anton Chekhov

464. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

466. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

469. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

471. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

475. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

484. “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

485. “I shall renounce it all beforehand.”

— Anton Chekhov

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

490. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

494. “This is a farce! You are not mad; you are simply a ridiculous fool. I used to think every fool was out of his senses, but now I see that lack of sense is a man’s normal state, and you are perfectly normal.”

— Anton Chekhov

495. “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

496. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

498. “That just about summed up modern justice – it wasn’t moral integrity and ability that were rewarded by promotions, medals, pensions, but simply getting on with the job, whatever it was.”

— Anton Chekhov

499. “He is barefooted.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov