Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

153. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

156. “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

157. “The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.”

— Anton Chekhov

158. “She had a passionate longing for the garden, the darkness, the pure sky, the stars.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

160. “And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country.”

— Anton Chekhov

161. “The more highly a man is developed on the intellectual and moral side, the more independent he is, the more pleasure life gives him. Socrates, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius, were joyful, not sorrowful. And the Apostle tells us: ‘Rejoice continually’; ‘Rejoice and be glad.”

— Anton Chekhov

162. “We can’t always know the whys and wherefores,′ the old man said. ‘A bird’s given two wings, not four, because it can fly with two; so a man’s not given to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know in order to live, so much he knows.”

— Anton Chekhov

163. “People who have an official, professional relation to other men’s sufferings – for instance, judges, police officers, doctors – in course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients; in this respect they are not different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in the back-yard, and does not notice the blood.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

165. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

168. “I’m in mourning for my life.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

175. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

187. “There isn’t a Monday that would not cede its place to Tuesday.”

— Anton Chekhov

188. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

190. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

199. “A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov