Top 300 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 2 of 7

51. “To advise is not to compel.”

— Anton Chekhov

52. “If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.”

— Anton Chekhov

53. “Try to reason about love, and you will lose your reason.”

— Anton Chekhov

54. “Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.”

— Anton Chekhov

55. “When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.”

— Anton Chekhov

56. “They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.”

— Anton Chekhov

57. “Even in Siberia there is happiness.”

— Anton Chekhov

58. “There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”

— Anton Chekhov

59. “Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.”

— Anton Chekhov

60. “Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don’t be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.”

— Anton Chekhov

61. “A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.”

— Anton Chekhov

62. “If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.”

— Anton Chekhov

63. “It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.”

— Anton Chekhov

64. “There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.”

— Anton Chekhov

65. “The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to.”

— Anton Chekhov

66. “Solomon made a big mistake when he asked for wisdom.”

— Anton Chekhov

67. “Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.”

— Anton Chekhov

68. “A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.”

— Anton Chekhov

69. “Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.”

— Anton Chekhov

70. “I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.”

— Anton Chekhov

71. “A good upbringing means not that you won’t spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won’t notice it when someone else does.”

— Anton Chekhov

72. “I don’t know why one can’t chase two rabbits at the same time, even in the literal sense of those words. If you have the hounds, go ahead and pursue.”

— Anton Chekhov

73. “In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”

— Anton Chekhov

74. “A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.”

— Anton Chekhov

75. “Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.”

— Anton Chekhov

76. “Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.”

— Anton Chekhov

77. “Brevity – the sister of talent.”

— Anton Chekhov

78. “When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.”

— Anton Chekhov

79. “In Russia there is no philosophy, but philosophize everything, even the small fry.”

— Anton Chekhov

80. “A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.”

— Anton Chekhov

81. “When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand.”

— Anton Chekhov

82. “To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.”

— Anton Chekhov

83. “The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.”

— Anton Chekhov

84. “You will not become a saint through other people’s sins.”

— Anton Chekhov

85. “A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.”

— Anton Chekhov

86. “For God’s sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch.”

— Anton Chekhov

87. “Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.”

— Anton Chekhov

88. “My holy of holies is the human body.”

— Anton Chekhov

89. “Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.”

— Anton Chekhov

90. “Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport.”

— Anton Chekhov

91. “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

— Anton Chekhov

92. “He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.”

— Anton Chekhov

93. “Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

95. “I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.”

— Anton Chekhov

96. “It is always “Youth, youth,” when there is nothing else to be said.”

— Anton Chekhov

97. “Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.”

— Anton Chekhov

98. “We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.”

— Anton Chekhov

99. “It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.”

— Anton Chekhov

100. “People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.”

— Anton Chekhov