Anton Chekhov Quotes (222 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Anton Chekhov

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Famous Anton Chekhov Quotes

“If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”

Anton Chekhov

Alternate translation: Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something.
Also quoted in Psychologically Speaking: A Book of Quotations, Kevin Connolly and Margaret Martlew, 1999, p. 96
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.”

Anton Chekhov

“People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.”

Anton Chekhov

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

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to the Chekhov family (April 25, 1887)
Letters

Anton Chekhov Quotes about people

“My mother and father are the only people on the whole planet for whom I will never begrudge a thing. Should I achieve great things, it is the work of their hands; they are splendid people and their absolute love of their children places them above the highest praise. It cloaks all of their shortcomings, shortcomings that may have resulted from a difficult life.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to his cousin, M.M. Chekhov (July 29, 1877)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov book Misfortune

Misfortune (1886)

“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

Act I
Uncle Vanya (1897)

“It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don’t just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.”

Anton Chekhov

Episode from a Practice or A Doctor's Visit (1898)

“I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to I.I. Orlov (February 22, 1899)
Letters

“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 book Gooseberries

Gooseberries (1898)

Anton Chekhov Quotes about life

“We fret ourselves to reform life, in order that posterity may be happy, and posterity will say as usual: "In the past it used to be better, the present is worse than the past."”

Anton Chekhov

Alternate translation: We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.
Мы хлопочем, чтобы изменить жизнь, чтобы потомки были счастливы, а потомки скажут по обыкновению: прежде лучше было, теперешняя жизнь хуже прежней.
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling. The cuckoo kept reckoning someone's years and losing count and beginning again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: "That's what you are! That's what you are!" What a noise there was! It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 8, pp. 224

“Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to his sister Maria Pavlovna Chekhov (November 13, 1898)
Letters

“It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others’ expense.”

Anton Chekhov book My Life

My Life (1896)

“All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.”

Anton Chekhov

In the Cart or A Journey by Cart or The Schoolmistress (1897)

“When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, life consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to M.V. Kiseleva (September 29, 1886)
Letters

Anton Chekhov: Trending quotes

“The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 9, 1890)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Мысль и красота, подобно урагану и волнам, не должны знать привычных, определенных форм.
A Letter (uncertain date, story not published by Chekhov)

“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

Fatherlessness or Platonov, Act I, sc. xiv (1878)

Anton Chekhov Quotes

“Happiness does not await us all. One needn’t be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to K.S. Barantsevich (March 3, 1888)
Letters

“Writers are as jealous as pigeons.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to I.L. Leontev (February 4, 1888)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Act IV
The Seagull (1896)

“Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 5, p. 206

“The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to his brother, A.P. Chekhov (September 24, 1888)
Letters

“In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 17, 1890)
Letters

“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

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (August 18, 1893)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (September 8, 1891)
Letters

“I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (September 11, 1888)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (June 16, 1892)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (January 2, 1894)
Letters

“Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (March 27, 1894)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

Act I
The Cherry Orchard (1904)

“It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

“Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else’s opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to K.S. Barantsevich (March 30, 1888)
Letters

“It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“Ah, but ignorance is better. At least then there's hope.”

Anton Chekhov

Act II
Uncle Vanya (1897)

“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 Ivanov

Ivanov, Act III, sc. vi (1887)

“Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.N. Pleshcheev (April 9, 1889)
Letters

“It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov

The Fruits of Long Meditations (1884)

“The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.”

Anton Chekhov

An Evil Night (1886)

“It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.”

Anton Chekhov

The Story of an Unknown Man or An Anonymous Story, ch. 15 (1893)

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to E.M. Shavrova (April 6, 1892)
Letters

“I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to a Learned Neighbor (1880)

“The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them…”

Anton Chekhov

Несчастные эгоистичны, злы, несправедливы, жестоки и менее, чем глупцы, способны понимать друг друга. Не соединяет, а разъединяет людей несчастье...
Enemies

“It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.”

Anton Chekhov

A Journey to Sakhalin (1891)

“If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say, and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy.”

Anton Chekhov

Act II
The Seagull (1896)

“I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 9, 1890)
Letters

“You are right to demand that an artist engage his work consciously, but you confuse two different things: solving the problem and correctly posing the question.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

“Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 20, 1891)
Letters

“Silence accompanies the most significant expressions of happiness and unhappiness: those in love understand one another best when silent, while the most heated and impassioned speech at a graveside touches only outsiders, but seems cold and inconsequential to the widow and children of the deceased.”

Anton Chekhov

Enemies (1887)

“We learn about life not from pluses alone, but from minuses as well.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 23, 1888)
Letters

“A grimy fly can soil the entire wall and a small, dirty little act can ruin the entire proceedings.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.N. Kanaev (March 26, 1883)
Letters

“Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the entrance. The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a ballad.”

Anton Chekhov book The Black Monk

The Black Monk (1894)

“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

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 27, 1889)
Letters

“Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.”

Anton Chekhov

Innocuous Thoughts (1885)

“It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean—that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses—that is science.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.”

Anton Chekhov

Ничто так не усыпляет и не опьяняет, как деньги; когда их много, то мир кажется лучше, чем он есть.
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“There is no Monday which will not give its place to Tuesday.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“They say: "In the long run truth will triumph;" but it is untrue.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust…. You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will…. Each hour is precious.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to his brother, N.P. Chekhov (March 1886)
Original: Чтобы воспитаться и не стоять ниже уровня среды, в которую попал, недостаточно прочесть только Пикквика и вызубрить монолог из «Фауста». <…> Тут нужны беспрерывный дневной и ночной труд, вечное чтение, штудировка, воля… Тут дорог каждый час…

“I have in my head a whole army of people pleading to be let out and awaiting my commands.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

“People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most uninteresting things in their lives.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)