Top 300 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “I’m in mourning for my life.”

— Anton Chekhov

152. “People’s destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring – they’re all alike, and they’re all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you – you’re one in a million. You’re happy –.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

154. “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

155. “If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.”

— Anton Chekhov

156. “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”

— Anton Chekhov

157. “Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

159. “Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let’s have a philosophical conversation.”

— Anton Chekhov

160. “There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.”

— Anton Chekhov

161. “MEDVIEDENKO Why do you always wear mourning? MASHA I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.”

— Anton Chekhov

162. “At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.”

— Anton Chekhov

163. “Never bring a cannon on stage in Act I unless you intend to fire it by the last act.”

— Anton Chekhov

164. “Everything on earth is beautiful, everything – except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.”

— Anton Chekhov

165. “And what does it mean – dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.”

— Anton Chekhov

166. “I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.”

— Anton Chekhov

167. “Love is a scandal of the personal sort.”

— Anton Chekhov

168. “All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.”

— Anton Chekhov

169. “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

170. “I should think I’m going to be a perpetual student.”

— Anton Chekhov

171. “Only one who loves can remember so well.”

— Anton Chekhov

172. “Once a man gets a fixed idea, there’s nothing to be done.”

— Anton Chekhov

173. “A man can deceive his fiancee or his mistress as much as he likes and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher. But a daughter is a different matter.”

— Anton Chekhov

174. “Reason and justice tell me there’s more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.”

— Anton Chekhov

175. “I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.”

— Anton Chekhov

176. “When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won’t intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.”

— Anton Chekhov

177. “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

178. “I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.”

— Anton Chekhov

179. “You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.”

— Anton Chekhov

180. “A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.”

— Anton Chekhov

181. “There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.”

— Anton Chekhov

182. “Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.”

— Anton Chekhov

183. “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.”

— Anton Chekhov

184. “What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.”

— Anton Chekhov

185. “I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.”

— Anton Chekhov

186. “Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.”

— Anton Chekhov

187. “Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.”

— Anton Chekhov

188. “In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.”

— Anton Chekhov

189. “Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.”

— Anton Chekhov

190. “By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.”

— Anton Chekhov

191. “If there’s any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.”

— Anton Chekhov

192. “Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.”

— Anton Chekhov

193. “A fiance is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.”

— Anton Chekhov

194. “To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.”

— Anton Chekhov

195. “Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.”

— Anton Chekhov

196. “Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read – my own or other people’s works – it all seems to me not short enough.”

— Anton Chekhov

197. “In all my life I never met anyone so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike. I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold and you don’t seem to understand what I say.”

— Anton Chekhov

198. “I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it’s tobacco, then let it be tobacco.”

— Anton Chekhov

199. “He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.”

— Anton Chekhov

200. “The stupider the peasant, the better the horse understands him.”

— Anton Chekhov