Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and physician who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.

Anton Chekhov Quotes

1. “Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.”
— Anton Chekhov

2. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
— Anton Chekhov

3. “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”
— Anton Chekhov

4. “Man is what he believes.”
— Anton Chekhov

5. “All saints have past and all sinners have a future.”
— Anton Chekhov

6. “Only entropy comes easy.”
— Anton Chekhov

7. “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”
— Anton Chekhov

8. “What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.”
— Anton Chekhov

9. “If you fear loneliness, then don’t get married.”
— Anton Chekhov

10. “You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.”
— Anton Chekhov

11. “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.”
— Anton Chekhov

12. “Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.”
— Anton Chekhov

13. “The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.”
— Anton Chekhov

14. “Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it’s unimaginable.”
— Anton Chekhov

15. “People should be beautiful in every way – in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.”
— Anton Chekhov

16. “I’ve never been in love. I’ve dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.”
— Anton Chekhov

17. “Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”
— Anton Chekhov

18. “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
— Anton Chekhov

19. “Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.”
— Anton Chekhov

20. “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
— Anton Chekhov

21. “My love is like a stone tied round my neck; it’s dragging me down to the bottom; but I love my stone. I can’t live without it.”
— Anton Chekhov

22. “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure.”
— Anton Chekhov

23. “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.”
— Anton Chekhov

24. “It’s very hard, feeling that you’re no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.”
— Anton Chekhov

25. “If there’s a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must fire the gun by act three, scene two. If you fire a gun in act three, scene two, you must see the gun on the wall in act one, scene one.”
— Anton Chekhov

26. “Advertising is the very essence of democracy.”
— Anton Chekhov

27. “Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.”
— Anton Chekhov

28. “Life has gone by as if I never lived.”
— Anton Chekhov

29. “Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.”
— Anton Chekhov

30. “The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.”
— Anton Chekhov

31. “There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments, but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.”
— Anton Chekhov

32. “There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.”
— Anton Chekhov

33. “I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.”
— Anton Chekhov

34. “One must speak about serious things seriously.”
— Anton Chekhov

35. “People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.”
— Anton Chekhov

36. “Women can’t forgive failure.”
— Anton Chekhov

37. “Dear sweet unforgettable childhood.”
— Anton Chekhov

38. “I’m the seagull. No, that’s not it. I’m an actress. That’s it.”
— Anton Chekhov

39. “We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.”
— Anton Chekhov

40. “When a woman isn’t beautiful, people always say, ‘You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.’”
— Anton Chekhov

41. “Everyone has the same God; only people differ.”
— Anton Chekhov

42. “The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.”
— Anton Chekhov

43. “Write only of what is important and eternal.”
— Anton Chekhov

44. “There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.”
— Anton Chekhov

45. “You ask me what life is. That’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more to know.”
— Anton Chekhov

46. “In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.”
— Anton Chekhov

47. “Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.”
— Anton Chekhov

48. “Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.”
— Anton Chekhov

49. “Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.”
— Anton Chekhov

50. “Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.”
— Anton Chekhov

51. “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”
— Anton Chekhov

52. “A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.”
— Anton Chekhov

53. “Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave’s blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being – not a slave’s – coursing through his veins.”
— Anton Chekhov

54. “The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to.”
— Anton Chekhov

55. “Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.”
— Anton Chekhov

56. “To advise is not to compel.”
— Anton Chekhov

57. “If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.”
— Anton Chekhov

58. “I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.”
— Anton Chekhov

59. “A good upbringing means not that you won’t spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won’t notice it when someone else does.”
— Anton Chekhov

60. “Try to reason about love, and you will lose your reason.”
— Anton Chekhov

61. “When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.”
— Anton Chekhov

62. “They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.”
— Anton Chekhov

63. “Even in Siberia there is happiness.”
— Anton Chekhov

64. “Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.”
— Anton Chekhov

65. “There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”
— Anton Chekhov

66. “Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don’t be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.”
— Anton Chekhov

67. “If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.”
— Anton Chekhov

68. “There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.”
— Anton Chekhov

69. “A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.”
— Anton Chekhov

70. “It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.”
— Anton Chekhov

71. “My holy of holies is the human body.”
— Anton Chekhov

72. “Solomon made a big mistake when he asked for wisdom.”
— Anton Chekhov

73. “A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.”
— Anton Chekhov

74. “It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.”
— Anton Chekhov

75. “Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.”
— Anton Chekhov

76. “Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.”
— Anton Chekhov

77. “I don’t know why one can’t chase two rabbits at the same time, even in the literal sense of those words. If you have the hounds, go ahead and pursue.”
— Anton Chekhov

78. “In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”
— Anton Chekhov

79. “In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.”
— Anton Chekhov

80. “Brevity – the sister of talent.”
— Anton Chekhov

81. “Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.”
— Anton Chekhov

82. “A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.”
— Anton Chekhov

83. “In Russia there is no philosophy, but philosophize everything, even the small fry.”
— Anton Chekhov

84. “When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.”
— Anton Chekhov

85. “At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.”
— Anton Chekhov

86. “A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.”
— Anton Chekhov

87. “To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.”
— Anton Chekhov

88. “When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand.”
— Anton Chekhov

89. “The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.”
— Anton Chekhov

90. “You will not become a saint through other people’s sins.”
— Anton Chekhov

91. “For God’s sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch.”
— Anton Chekhov

92. “Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.”
— Anton Chekhov

93. “To fear love is to fear life, and those whose fear life are already three parts dead…”
— Anton Chekhov

94. “Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport.”
— Anton Chekhov

95. “Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.”
— Anton Chekhov

96. “He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.”
— Anton Chekhov

97. “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
— Anton Chekhov

98. “What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?”
— Anton Chekhov

99. “Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.”
— Anton Chekhov

100. “What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.”
— Anton Chekhov

101. “I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.”
— Anton Chekhov

102. “The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.”
— Anton Chekhov

103. “The more refined one is, the more unhappy.”
— Anton Chekhov

104. “My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom – freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.”
— Anton Chekhov

105. “Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.”
— Anton Chekhov

106. “If I had listened to the critics I’d have died drunk in the gutter.”
— Anton Chekhov

107. “It is always “Youth, youth,” when there is nothing else to be said.”
— Anton Chekhov

108. “Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.”
— Anton Chekhov

109. “We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.”
— Anton Chekhov

110. “People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.”
— Anton Chekhov

111. “When we retreat to the country, we are hiding not from people, but from our pride, which, in the city and among people, operates unfairly and immoderately.”
— Anton Chekhov

112. “He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.”
— Anton Chekhov

113. “Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make? Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day.”
— Anton Chekhov

114. “My mistress has come home; at last I’ve seen her. Now I’m ready to die.”
— Anton Chekhov

115. “I have the feeling that I’ve seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.”
— Anton Chekhov

116. “I am dying. I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time.”
— Anton Chekhov

117. “The snow has not yet left the earth but spring is already asking to enter your heart…”
— Anton Chekhov

118. “The sea has neither meaning nor pity.”
— Anton Chekhov

119. “There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.”
— Anton Chekhov

120. “Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.”
— Anton Chekhov

121. “Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given.”
— Anton Chekhov

122. “The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.”
— Anton Chekhov

123. “The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.”
— Anton Chekhov

124. “Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one whokills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?”
— Anton Chekhov

125. “The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.”
— Anton Chekhov

126. “When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can’t be cured.”
— Anton Chekhov

127. “The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.”
— Anton Chekhov

128. “Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.”
— Anton Chekhov

129. “I expect I shall be a student to the end of my days.”
— Anton Chekhov

130. “In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.”
— Anton Chekhov

131. “Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.”
— Anton Chekhov

132. “The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.”
— Anton Chekhov

133. “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!”
— Anton Chekhov

134. “Common hypocrites pass themselves off as doves; political and literary hypocrites pose as eagles. But don’t be fooled by their eagle-like appearance. These are not eagles, but rats or dogs.”
— Anton Chekhov

135. “I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.”
— Anton Chekhov

136. “I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view – I change it every month – and so I’ll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.”
— Anton Chekhov

137. “Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you who you are.”
— Anton Chekhov

138. “Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!”
— Anton Chekhov

139. “A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.”
— Anton Chekhov

140. “An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.”
— Anton Chekhov

141. “Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.”
— Anton Chekhov

142. “When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries.”
— Anton Chekhov

143. “Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one’s dignity.”
— Anton Chekhov

144. “We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.”
— Anton Chekhov

145. “Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.”
— Anton Chekhov

146. “There is nothing new in art except talent.”
— Anton Chekhov

147. “A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.”
— Anton Chekhov

148. “One can only call that youth healthful which refuses to be reconciled to old ways and which, foolishly or shrewdly, combats the old. This is nature’s charge and all progress hinges upon it.”
— Anton Chekhov

149. “I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.”
— Anton Chekhov

150. “I am now and have always been a stranger to the realm of practical matters.”
— Anton Chekhov

151. “To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.”
— Anton Chekhov

152. “One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll beproving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”
— Anton Chekhov

153. “Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.”
— Anton Chekhov

154. “Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.”
— Anton Chekhov

155. “One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.”
— Anton Chekhov

156. “If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.”
— Anton Chekhov

157. “Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.”
— Anton Chekhov

158. “Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.”
— Anton Chekhov

159. “I’m in mourning for my life.”
— Anton Chekhov

160. “Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.”
— Anton Chekhov

161. “If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.”
— Anton Chekhov

162. “People’s destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring – they’re all alike, and they’re all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you – you’re one in a million. You’re happy –.”
— Anton Chekhov

163. “The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.”
— Anton Chekhov

164. “Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.”
— Anton Chekhov

165. “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”
— Anton Chekhov

166. “MEDVIEDENKO Why do you always wear mourning? MASHA I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.”
— Anton Chekhov

167. “Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let’s have a philosophical conversation.”
— Anton Chekhov

168. “There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.”
— Anton Chekhov

169. “And what does it mean – dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.”
— Anton Chekhov

170. “I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.”
— Anton Chekhov

171. “Everything on earth is beautiful, everything – except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.”
— Anton Chekhov

172. “Never bring a cannon on stage in Act I unless you intend to fire it by the last act.”
— Anton Chekhov

173. “Love is a scandal of the personal sort.”
— Anton Chekhov

174. “I should think I’m going to be a perpetual student.”
— Anton Chekhov

175. “Once a man gets a fixed idea, there’s nothing to be done.”
— Anton Chekhov

176. “All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.”
— Anton Chekhov

177. “When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won’t intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.”
— Anton Chekhov

178. “Reason and justice tell me there’s more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.”
— Anton Chekhov

179. “A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.”
— Anton Chekhov

180. “Only one who loves can remember so well.”
— Anton Chekhov

181. “A man can deceive his fiancee or his mistress as much as he likes and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher. But a daughter is a different matter.”
— Anton Chekhov

182. “I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.”
— Anton Chekhov

183. “I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.”
— Anton Chekhov

184. “There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.”
— Anton Chekhov

185. “Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.”
— Anton Chekhov

186. “You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.”
— Anton Chekhov

187. “In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.”
— Anton Chekhov

188. “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.”
— Anton Chekhov

189. “I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.”
— Anton Chekhov

190. “Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read – my own or other people’s works – it all seems to me not short enough.”
— Anton Chekhov

191. “Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.”
— Anton Chekhov

192. “Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.”
— Anton Chekhov

193. “Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.”
— Anton Chekhov

194. “To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.”
— Anton Chekhov

195. “If there’s any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.”
— Anton Chekhov

196. “By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.”
— Anton Chekhov

197. “He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.”
— Anton Chekhov

198. “A fiance is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.”
— Anton Chekhov

199. “Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.”
— Anton Chekhov

200. “A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.”
— Anton Chekhov