Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

355. “There is a saying: the woman had no cares, so she bought a pig. The Luganoviches had no worries, so they made friends with me.”

— Anton Chekhov

356. “Faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse still – mere waste of time and nothing more.”

— Anton Chekhov

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

368. “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

369. “She talks philosophy and tries to commit suicide every now and again, apparently in order to annoy her husband.”

— Anton Chekhov

370. “So go! E finita la comedia!”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

372. “The fear of death is an animal passion which must be overcome. Only those who believe in a future life and tremble for sins committed, can logically fear death.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

374. “That’s it, I guess. Just go on living, whether you feel like it or not.”

— Anton Chekhov

375. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

377. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

379. “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

380. “You refer me to the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect, but is there order or natural law in that I, a living, thinking creature, should stand by a ditch until it fills up, or is narrowed, when I could jump it or throw a bridge over it? Tell me, I say, why should we wait? Wait, when we have no strength to live, and yet must live and are full of the desire to live!”

— Anton Chekhov

381. “He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives;.”

— Anton Chekhov

382. “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

383. “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

384. “You see and hear that they lie,” said Ivan Ivanovitch, turning over on the other side, “and they call you a fool for putting up with their lying. You endure insult and humiliation, and dare not openly say that you are on the side of the honest and the free, and you lie and smile yourself; and all that for the sake of a crust of bread, for the sake of a warm corner, for the sake of a wretched little worthless rank in the service. No, one can’t go on living like this.”

— Anton Chekhov

385. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

387. “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

388. “The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.”

— Anton Chekhov

389. “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

390. “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

391. “Life’s all done, just as if I never even lived it...”

— Anton Chekhov

392. “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

393. “In your veins flows a mermaid’s blood, so be a mermaid.”

— Anton Chekhov

394. “The sunlight and the sounds told him that somewhere in this world there is a pure, refined, poetical life. But where was it?”

— Anton Chekhov

395. “Don’t be ashamed of loving someone. You should know that someone who must be ashamed; actually that who does not know how to love someone even though know loved by someone.”

— Anton Chekhov

396. “You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.”

— Anton Chekhov

397. “Those who suffer are egoistic, angry, unjust, and cruel, and less able to understand one another than really stupid people. Misfortune, far from uniting people, separates them, and even when it might be supposed that similarity of misfortune ought to bring people together, they show themselves a great deal more unjust and ruthless than do those who are comparatively content.”

— Anton Chekhov

398. “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

399. “Poetry’s one thing and love is another. It’s just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite another.”

— Anton Chekhov

400. “So far only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: ‘This is a great mystery.”

— Anton Chekhov