Top 300 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “When we retreat to the country, we are hiding not from people, but from our pride, which, in the city and among people, operates unfairly and immoderately.”

— Anton Chekhov

102. “The more refined one is, the more unhappy.”

— Anton Chekhov

103. “My mistress has come home; at last I’ve seen her. Now I’m ready to die.”

— Anton Chekhov

104. “I have the feeling that I’ve seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.”

— Anton Chekhov

105. “Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.”

— Anton Chekhov

106. “In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.”

— Anton Chekhov

107. “The sea has neither meaning nor pity.”

— Anton Chekhov

108. “There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.”

— Anton Chekhov

109. “Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given.”

— Anton Chekhov

110. “The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.”

— Anton Chekhov

111. “When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can’t be cured.”

— Anton Chekhov

112. “The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.”

— Anton Chekhov

113. “Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.”

— Anton Chekhov

114. “The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.”

— Anton Chekhov

115. “The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.”

— Anton Chekhov

116. “I expect I shall be a student to the end of my days.”

— Anton Chekhov

117. “Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.”

— Anton Chekhov

118. “In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.”

— Anton Chekhov

119. “To fear love is to fear life, and those whose fear life are already three parts dead...”

— Anton Chekhov

120. “What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?”

— Anton Chekhov

121. “Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.”

— Anton Chekhov

122. “Common hypocrites pass themselves off as doves; political and literary hypocrites pose as eagles. But don’t be fooled by their eagle-like appearance. These are not eagles, but rats or dogs.”

— Anton Chekhov

123. “I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.”

— Anton Chekhov

124. “Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!”

— Anton Chekhov

125. “I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view – I change it every month – and so I’ll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.”

— Anton Chekhov

126. “An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.”

— Anton Chekhov

127. “My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom – freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.”

— Anton Chekhov

128. “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!”

— Anton Chekhov

129. “If I had listened to the critics I’d have died drunk in the gutter.”

— Anton Chekhov

130. “Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.”

— Anton Chekhov

131. “When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries.”

— Anton Chekhov

132. “Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you who you are.”

— Anton Chekhov

133. “Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one’s dignity.”

— Anton Chekhov

134. “Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.”

— Anton Chekhov

135. “There is nothing new in art except talent.”

— Anton Chekhov

136. “A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.”

— Anton Chekhov

137. “One can only call that youth healthful which refuses to be reconciled to old ways and which, foolishly or shrewdly, combats the old. This is nature’s charge and all progress hinges upon it.”

— Anton Chekhov

138. “I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.”

— Anton Chekhov

139. “I am now and have always been a stranger to the realm of practical matters.”

— Anton Chekhov

140. “Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.”

— Anton Chekhov

141. “To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.”

— Anton Chekhov

142. “One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll beproving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”

— Anton Chekhov

143. “We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.”

— Anton Chekhov

144. “Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.”

— Anton Chekhov

145. “He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.”

— Anton Chekhov

146. “One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.”

— Anton Chekhov

147. “If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.”

— Anton Chekhov

148. “Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.”

— Anton Chekhov

149. “I am dying. I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time.”

— Anton Chekhov

150. “Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.”

— Anton Chekhov