Top 500 Anton Chekhov Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

421. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

423. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

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

— Anton Chekhov

436. “Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people’s altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to justify and conceal one’s own rottenness and moral poverty is only possible for a very vain, base, and nasty creature.”

— Anton Chekhov

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

445. “There is something mystical in the proud man in the sense in which you use the words. You may be right from your point of view, but, if we look at it simple-mindedly, what room is there for pride? Is there any sense in it, when man is so poorly constructed from the physiological point of view, when the vast majority of us are so gross and stupid and profoundly unhappy? We must give up admiring ourselves. The only thing to do is to work.”

— Anton Chekhov

446. “She was fond of her comfort.”

— 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. “The humane studies of which you speak will only satisfy human thought when, as they advance, they meet the exact sciences and progress side by side with them. Whether they will meet under a new microscope, or in the new monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I do not know, but I expect the Earth will be covered in a crust of ice before it comes to pass.”

— Anton Chekhov

449. “Though what is ‘Romeo and Juliet’ after all?” he added after a short pause. “The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses under which they try to hide its rottenness. Romeo is just the same sort of animal as all the rest of us.”

— Anton Chekhov

450. “You really need to be alone when you are travelling. It’s much more interesting to sit in a coach or in your room with your own thoughts than it is to be with people.”

— Anton Chekhov