Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

405. “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

406. “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

407. “There is no wall so solid that a breach cannot be made in it, but our modern lovers, from what I know of them, are too timid, inert, lazy and mistrustful, and resign themselves too quickly to the thought that they are failures, that life has cheated them in love. Instead of fighting, they merely criticize the world for its pettiness, forgetting that their very criticism gradually dwindles down to petty fault-finding.”

— Anton Chekhov

408. “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

409. “When a person expends the least possible amount of energy on a certain act, that is grace.”

— Anton Chekhov

410. “You are the incarnation of the blessing of God, which rests upon men.”

— Anton Chekhov

411. “You have forgotten that a conviction, in itself, is nothing but a dead letter. You should have done something.”

— Anton Chekhov

412. “My illness is only that in twenty years I have only found one intelligent man in the whole town, and he is mad.”

— Anton Chekhov

413. “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

414. “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

415. “MASHA : Happiness does not depend on riches; poor men are often happy.”

— Anton Chekhov

416. “Any one who has lived in the country in winter and knows those long dreary, still evenings when even the dogs are too bored to bark and even the clocks seem weary of ticking, and any one who on such evenings has been troubled by awakening conscience and has moved restlessly about, trying now to smother his conscience, now to interpret it, will understand the distraction and the pleasure my wife’s voice gave me as it sounded in the snug little room, telling me I was a bad man.”

— Anton Chekhov

417. “To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist, he must lay aside his personal subjective standpoint and must understand that muck heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that the evil passions are as inherent in life as the good ones.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

419. “When you look for a long time into the deep sky, without taking your eyes away, your thoughts and soul merge for some reason in an awareness of loneliness. You begin to feel yourself irremediably alone, and all that you once considered close and dear becomes infinitely distant and devoid of value.”

— Anton Chekhov

420. “The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of human beings.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

422. “This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and.”

— Anton Chekhov

423. “But, as I was saying, life holds nothing for me; my race is run. I am old, I am tired, I am trivial; my sensibilities are dead. I could never attach myself to any one again.”

— Anton Chekhov

424. “Your insincerity is natural and in the order of things. If people agreed together and suddenly became sincere, everything would go to the devil.”

— Anton Chekhov

425. “In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don’t feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger – a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...”

— Anton Chekhov

426. “But I write badly. The part of my brain in charge of writing ability refuses to work. My memory has weakened, my thoughts lack consistency, and each time I set them down on paper it seems to me that I’ve lost the intuition of their organic connection, the constructions are monotonous, the phrasing impoverished and timid.”

— Anton Chekhov

427. “What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding?”

— Anton Chekhov

428. “He belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people.”

— Anton Chekhov

429. “I look upon labels and tags as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist.”

— Anton Chekhov

430. “I hope that in the next world I shall be able to look back upon this life and say: Those were beautiful dreams.”

— Anton Chekhov

431. “People say that a person needs six feet of earth. But in fact it’s a corpse that needs six feet of earth, not a person. People don’t need six feet of earth, or even a house in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature in its entirety, so they can have the space to express all the capacities and particularities of their free spirit.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

433. “Whenever Germans or Englishmen get together, they talk about the crops, the price of wool, or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects – but especially women.”

— Anton Chekhov

434. “I’m not a liberal, or a conservative, or a gradualist, or a monk, or an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and that’s all...”

— Anton Chekhov

435. “But it is difficult to strike a match against a crumbling stone.”

— Anton Chekhov

436. “As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy.”

— Anton Chekhov

437. “Oh, if only this new, bright life would come sooner, when one could look one’s fate directly and boldly in the eye, be conscious of one’s rightness, be cheerful, free! And this life would come sooner or later!”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

439. “The real person, for whom everything is being done, is the devil.”

— Anton Chekhov

440. “There are a great many wicked people in the world,” said Emelyan.”

— Anton Chekhov

441. “We attach no value to our own opinion even when it is wise, but tremble before the opinion of all sorts of stupid people.”

— Anton Chekhov

442. “If Iona’s heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight...”

— Anton Chekhov

443. “Only echoes answer me.”

— Anton Chekhov

444. “THE Superintendent said to me: “I only keep you out of regard for your worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago.” I replied to him: “You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming that I am capable of flying.”

— Anton Chekhov

445. “His soul is still hovering here, near his body,” says the young man. “It does not depart from the body for three days.”

— Anton Chekhov

446. “Don’t forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.”

— Anton Chekhov

447. “The chance you give the wrong guy who is run across with you at the right time, unless you don’t give a chance the right guy who is run across with you at the wrong time, only you will always be upset.”

— Anton Chekhov

448. “It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself.”

— Anton Chekhov

449. “There was anything else, but not love.”

— Anton Chekhov

450. “The aim of fiction is honest and absolute truth.”

— Anton Chekhov