Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.”

— Anton Chekhov

352. “They say man only needs six feet of Earth. But it is a corpse, and not man, which needs these six feet.”

— Anton Chekhov

353. “I used to think every fool was out of his senses, but now I see that lack of sense is a man’s normal state, and you are perfectly normal.”

— Anton Chekhov

354. “Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.”

— Anton Chekhov

355. “A good man’s indifference is as good as any religion.”

— Anton Chekhov

356. “Forgiven? No. I am a bad, low woman; I despise myself and don’t attempt to justify myself. It’s not my husband but myself I have deceived. And not only just now; I have been deceiving myself for a long time.”

— Anton Chekhov

357. “It’s much more honest to deceive a man than to break up his family life and injure his reputation. I understand.”

— Anton Chekhov

358. “Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?”

— Anton Chekhov

359. “So go! E finita la comedia!”

— Anton Chekhov

360. “You are cultured and intelligent, Ivan, and you surely understand that the world is not destroyed by villains and conflagrations, but by hate and malice and all this spiteful tattling. It is your duty to make peace, and not to growl at everything.”

— Anton Chekhov

361. “I don’t know what sadness, grief, or boredom is. Here I am not asleep; I suffer from sleeplessness, but I am not dull. I say it in earnest; I begin to feel perplexed.”

— Anton Chekhov

362. “I feel as if I had been in the world a thousand years, and I trail my life behind me like an endless scarf.”

— Anton Chekhov

363. “He read like a man afloat on the sea, surrounded by the wreckage of his ship, trying to save his life by desperately clutching first to one fragment and then another.”

— Anton Chekhov

364. “But perhaps the universe is suspended on the tooth of some monster.”

— Anton Chekhov

365. “In the search for truth man makes two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes, and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them on and on.”

— Anton Chekhov

366. “Those who take an official, business-like attitude towards other people’s suffering, like judges, policemen, doctors, from force of habit, as time goes by, become callous to such a degree that they would be unable to treat their clients otherwise than formally even if they wanted to; in this respect they are no different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in his backyard without noticing the blood.”

— Anton Chekhov

367. “A woman can only become a man’s friend after having first been his acquaintance and then his beloved – then she becomes his friend.”

— Anton Chekhov

368. “Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the fundamental qualities of every true talent.”

— Anton Chekhov

369. “You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.”

— Anton Chekhov

370. “I know exactly the potential of the people around here. They have the potential to lie. They have the potential to deceive. They have the potential to inveigle. They’ll change nothing. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I lie awake thinking, my God! We have so much. We have these huge forests. We have boundless open fields. We can see the deepest, furthest horizons. Look around you. Look. We should be giants. We really, really aren’t.”

— Anton Chekhov

371. “When the geese have cackled they will be still again. First they cackle and then they stop.”

— Anton Chekhov

372. “I am drunk. I usually only drink like this once a month. At such times my audacity and temerity know no bounds. I feel capable of anything. I attempt the most difficult operations and do them magnificently. The most brilliant plans for the future take shape in my head. I am no longer a poor fool of a doctor, but mankind’s greatest benefactor. I evolve my own system of philosophy and all of you seem to crawl at my feet like so many insects or microbes.”

— Anton Chekhov

373. “There is nothing good in this world that does not have some filth in its origin.”

— Anton Chekhov

374. “And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life.”

— Anton Chekhov

375. “But we all have to die, you know. Death is not a potato.”

— Anton Chekhov

376. “If you could only see your face, your gestures! Oh, how tedious your life must be.”

— Anton Chekhov

377. “All these torments which the fish undergoes during the period of love are called “migration to death” in Russian, because they inevitably lead to death, and not a single one of the fish ever returns to the ocean – they all die in the rivers. “Irresistible bouts of erotic attraction leading to one’s demise,” says Middendorf.”

— Anton Chekhov

378. “The Tartar looked at the sky. The stars were as many as at home, there was the same blackness around, but something was missing. At home, in Simbirsk province, the stars were not like that at all, nor was the sky.”

— Anton Chekhov

379. “Butterfly land on a human just once in life; if you miss that oppurtunity, you have no another chance. Because that butterfly will be dead the next day.”

— Anton Chekhov

380. “How fortunate Buddha, Mahomed, and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not cure them of their ecstasy and their inspiration.”

— Anton Chekhov

381. “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.”

— Anton Chekhov

382. “Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings – the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky – Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.”

— Anton Chekhov

383. “For Masha: who doesn’t know where she came from or why she goes on living.”

— Anton Chekhov

384. “The State is not God. It has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should so desire.”

— Anton Chekhov

385. “And you know that anyone who at least once in his life has caught a perch or seen blackbirds migrating in the fall, when they rush in flocks over the village on clear, cool days, is no longer a townsman, and will be drawn towards freedom till his dying day.”

— Anton Chekhov

386. “So it is in life... In search of the truth, people make two steps forward and one step back. Sufferings, mistakes, and the tedium of life throw them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Maybe they’ll row their way to the real truth...”

— Anton Chekhov

387. “When real life is wanting one must create an illusion. It is better than nothing.”

— Anton Chekhov

388. “I yearned for mental tranquility, health, fresh air, good food. I was becoming a dreamer, and, like a dreamer, I did not know exactly what I wanted.”

— Anton Chekhov

389. “You are confusing two notions, “the solution of a problem” and “the correct posing of the question”. Only the second is essential for the artist.”

— Anton Chekhov

390. “And the wind, the wind! The bare birches and cherry-trees, unable to endure its rude caresses, bowed low down to the ground and wailed: “God, for what sin hast Thou bound us to the earth and will not let us go free?”

— Anton Chekhov

391. “An idle life cannot be pure.”

— Anton Chekhov

392. “IT was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.”

— Anton Chekhov

393. “Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep.”

— Anton Chekhov

394. “There is no greater sorrow than to know another’s secret when you cannot help them.”

— Anton Chekhov

395. “Andrei Yefimych is extremely fond of intelligence and honesty, but he lacks character and faith in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life around him.”

— Anton Chekhov

396. “Purity and virtue scarcely differ from vice, if they’re not free of malice.”

— Anton Chekhov

397. “Without solitude true happiness was impossible. The fallen angel was faithless to God probably only because he longed for solitude, which angles knew not.”

— Anton Chekhov

398. “The bullet is followed by the silence of the grave, but a wasted youth is followed by years of grief and agonising memories.”

— Anton Chekhov

399. “And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.”

— Anton Chekhov

400. “The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living.”

— Anton Chekhov