Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

206. “It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

211. “How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.”

— Anton Chekhov

212. “When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.”

— Anton Chekhov

213. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

217. “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

218. “And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

220. “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

221. “The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.”

— Anton Chekhov

222. “Writers are as jealous as pigeons.”

— Anton Chekhov

223. “The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issuesnot from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.”

— Anton Chekhov

224. “Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.”

— Anton Chekhov

225. “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

226. “Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.”

— Anton Chekhov

227. “It’s not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.”

— Anton Chekhov

228. “Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far asblather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.”

— Anton Chekhov

229. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne.”

— Anton Chekhov

230. “The more cultured a man, the less fortunate he is.”

— Anton Chekhov

231. “Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.”

— Anton Chekhov

232. “One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.”

— Anton Chekhov

233. “Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.”

— Anton Chekhov

234. “Even while lying, you’ll be believed if you speak with authority.”

— Anton Chekhov

235. “What a delight it is to respect people!”

— Anton Chekhov

236. “When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.”

— Anton Chekhov

237. “Three o’clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can’t sleep, I am so happy.”

— Anton Chekhov

238. “Our pride and self-importance are European, while our development and actions are Asiatic.”

— Anton Chekhov

239. “A woman can become a man’s friend only in the following stages – first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.”

— Anton Chekhov

240. “Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.”

— Anton Chekhov

241. “The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.”

— Anton Chekhov

242. “An artist’s flair is sometimes worth a scientist’s brains.”

— Anton Chekhov

243. “For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.”

— Anton Chekhov

244. “It is the writer’s business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.”

— Anton Chekhov

245. “Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields.”

— Anton Chekhov

246. “You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!”

— Anton Chekhov

247. “Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure.”

— Anton Chekhov

248. “When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean-that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses-that is science.”

— Anton Chekhov

249. “Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.”

— Anton Chekhov

250. “A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.”

— Anton Chekhov