Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “The Lie which elates us is dearer than a thousand sober truths.”

— Anton Chekhov

405. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

407. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

409. “Strange indecision!”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

412. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

418. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “An idle life cannot be pure.”

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

432. “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

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

— 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. “Cuando se piensa en comida, se nota un cierto alivio en el alma.”

— Anton Chekhov

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

448. “Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most glaring objects.”

— Anton Chekhov

449. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov