Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “MASHA : Happiness does not depend on riches; poor men are often happy.”

— Anton Chekhov

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

411. “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

412. “Love must be plucked out the moment it springs up in the heart.”

— Anton Chekhov

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

423. “He keeps going, going, going on; his people groan and fall one after the other, but he keeps on going, going and in the end, perishes himself, but still remains the despot and tsar of the desert because the cross over his grave is visible to caravans thirty-forty miles away and reigns over the wasteland.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

425. “As a good actor reflects in himself the movements and voice of others, so Vassilyev could reflect in his soul the sufferings of others. When he saw tears, he wept; beside a sick.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

428. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

435. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

441. “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

442. “It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man.”

— Anton Chekhov

443. “The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic’s that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.”

— Anton Chekhov

444. “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

445. “Free and profound thought, which strives towards the comprehension of life, and a complete scorn for the foolish vanity of the world – man has never known anything higher than these two blessings.”

— Anton Chekhov

446. “In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it’s extremely difficult to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people. I.”

— Anton Chekhov

447. “Why cannot you look calmly at a woman unless she is yours? Because, the doctor was right, you are all possessed by a devil of destruction; you have no mercy on the woods or the birds or on women or on one another.”

— Anton Chekhov

448. “But is eternal truth of use to man and within his reach, if there is no eternal life?” “There is eternal life,” said the monk.”

— Anton Chekhov

449. “I am a book-worm and a scholar, and am unfamiliar with practical affairs.”

— Anton Chekhov

450. “Strange indecision!”

— Anton Chekhov