Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “MASHA : Happiness does not depend on riches; poor men are often happy.”

— Anton Chekhov

402. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “It’s painful listening to the clowning of the unfortunate or the dying.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

417. “In this town to know three languages is an unnecessary luxury. It’s not even a luxury, but a sort of unnecessary addition, like a sixth finger. We have a great deal of superfluous knowledge.”

— Anton Chekhov

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “Lonely people read a great deal, but say little and hear little.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

427. “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

428. “What aristocratic writers are given by nature for nothing, commoners acquire at the cost of their youth.”

— Anton Chekhov

429. “Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with her hand.”

— Anton Chekhov

430. “Within a year Ivan Dmitritch was completely forgotten in the town, and his books, heaped up by his landlady in a sledge in the shed, were pulled to pieces by boys.”

— Anton Chekhov

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

439. “And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country.”

— Anton Chekhov

440. “I went to the Hotel of the Violet Hippopotamus and drank five glasses of good wine.”

— Anton Chekhov

441. “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

442. “Loud voices were heard from upstairs. “Madame Kushkin is in a fit, most likely, or else she has.”

— Anton Chekhov

443. “With total rapture and delight he talks about the birds which he can see from his prison window, and which he had never noticed before, when he was a minister. Now of course, after he’s been released, he doesn’t notice the birds anymore, just as beforehand. In the same way you won’t notice Moscow, when you actually live there.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

445. “In spite of his clumsiness and rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and goodness of heart, always ready to be of use.”

— Anton Chekhov

446. “True happiness is impossible without privacy. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he wanted the privacy denied to an angel.”

— Anton Chekhov

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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