Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

104. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

111. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

113. “Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

115. “Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make? Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

117. “Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

121. “The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

123. “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

124. “The snow has not yet left the earth but spring is already asking to enter your heart...”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

126. “Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one whokills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

129. “A human being should be entirely beautiful: the face, the clothes, the mind, the thoughts. Your step-mother is, of course, beautiful to look at, but don’t you see? She does nothing but sleep and eat and walk and bewitch us, and that is all. She has no responsibilities, everything is done for her – am I not right? And an idle life can never be a pure one.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

136. “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

137. “The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

139. “Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.”

— Anton Chekhov

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

150. “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