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Anton Chekhov Quotes
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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text".Chekhov had at first written stories to earn money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. January 1860 – 2. July 1904   •   Other names Anton Čechov, Anton Pawlowitsch Tschechow
Anton Chekhov photo
Anton Chekhov: 222   quotes 5   likes

Anton Chekhov Quotes

“The sea has neither meaning nor pity.”

Anton Chekhov book Gusev

Gusev (1890)

Sea

“Instructing in cures, therapists always recommend that “each case be individualized.” If this advice is followed, one becomes persuaded that those means recommended in textbooks as the best, means perfectly appropriate for the template case, turn out to be completely unsuitable in individual cases.”

Anton Chekhov

A Dreary Story or A Tedious Story (1889)

“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

Letter to Alexei Pleshcheev (October 4, 1888)
Letters

God

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to L.A. Avilova (April 27, 1899)
Letters

Fate

“A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.”

Anton Chekhov

Love (1886)

“There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”

Anton Chekhov book The Teacher of Literature

The Teacher of Literature (1894)

“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

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (February 25, 1895)
Letters

Love , Training , Night

“People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.”

Anton Chekhov book About Love

About Love (1898)

People

“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

Ward No. 6

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Help

“Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 3, 1892)
Letters

Drink , Problem , Sleep , Distant

“Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (March 16, 1895)
Letters

Beauty , Game , Sense , Sport

“There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.”

Anton Chekhov

The Man in a Case (1898)

People , World , Nature

“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

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (May 15, 1889)
Letters

War , Feeling , Search , Understanding

“How pleasant it is to respect people! When I see books, I am not concerned with how the authors loved or played cards; I see only their marvelous works.”

Anton Chekhov

Какое наслаждение уважать людей! Когда я вижу книги, мне нет дела до того, как авторы любили, играли в карты, я вижу только их изумительные дела.
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Love , People , Books

“Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Fools

“Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to I.L. Leontev (August 29, 1888)
Letters

“Yes, that's how it is, child. He who works, he who is patient is the superior.”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 5, pp. 208

“Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to M.V. Kiseleva (January 14, 1887
Letters

Literature , Effort

“In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (January 6, 1889)
Letters

“There are in life such confluences of circumstances that render the reproach that we are not Voltaires most inopportune.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (February 6, 1898)
Letters

Life

“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

Letter to L.A. Avilova (April 29, 1892)
Letters

Money , Spring

“By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. … 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

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (March 23, 1895)
Letters

Appearance , Country

“All Russia is our orchard.”

Anton Chekhov

Act II
The Cherry Orchard (1904)

“Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and tortuous to write a bad one.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (May 4, 1889)
Letters

“"Why do I love him so much, mamma? Why do I feel so sorry for him?" she went on in a quivering voice, and her eyes glistened with tears. "Who is he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb, but I love him; I love him like a real person. Here he can do nothing, he can't talk, and yet I know what he wants with his little eyes."”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 6, pp. 216

Love , Feeling , Tear , Light

“While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.”

Anton Chekhov

Ionych (1898)

Guy , Science , Personality

“Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.”

Anton Chekhov

In a Native Corner or At Home (1897)

Life , Music , Nature

“Between "there is a God" and "there is no God" lies a whole vast tract, which the really wise man crosses with great effort. A Russian knows one or other of these two extremes, and the middle tract between them does not interest him; and therefore he usually knows nothing, or very little.”

Anton Chekhov

Diary, 1897
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

God , Effort

“There are no lower or higher or median moralities. There is only one morality, and it is precisely the one that was given to us during the time of Jesus Christ and that stops me, you and Barantsevich from stealing, offending others, lying etc.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to I.L. Leontev (March 22, 1890)
Letters

Lying , Time , Christ

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

Anton Chekhov

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (August 18, 1891)
Letters

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

Anton Chekhov book The Bet

The Bet (1889)

Life

“If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.”

Anton Chekhov book The Lady with the Dog

The Lady with the Dog (1899)

World , Thinking , Forgetting

“Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.”

Anton Chekhov

Episode from a Practice

Life , Law , Nature , Strong

“[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.”

Anton Chekhov book Verotchka

Verotchka (1887)

Understanding , Change

“Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels…. They must not be turned into a plaything of one’s mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to his brother, A.P. Chekhov (January 2, 1889)
Letters

Children , Angels , Mood , Kiss

“"Grigory Petrovitch, let us weep, let us weep with joy!" he said in a thin voice, and then at once burst out laughing in a loud bass guffaw. "Ho-ho-ho! This is a fine daughter-in-law for you too! Everything is in its place in her; all runs smoothly, no creaking, the mechanism works well, lots of screws in it."”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 3, pp. 193-4

Law , Joy , Daughters

“When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters but telegrams.”

Anton Chekhov

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Money

“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

Letter to Alexei Pleshcheev (October 4, 1888)
Letters

Love , Health , Imagination , Intelligence

“He who constantly swims in the ocean loves dry land.”

Anton Chekhov

Letter to E.M. Shavrova (September 16, 1891)
Letters

Love

“She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …”

Anton Chekhov book The Lady with the Dog

Она много читала, не писала въ письмахъ ъ, …
The Lady with the Dog

Reading

“Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.”

Anton Chekhov

Act IV
Uncle Vanya (1897)

Happiness

“After us they’ll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, “Oh! Life is so hard!””

Anton Chekhov

and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
Act II
The Three Sisters (1901)

Life , Death , Secret , Sense

“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 book Gooseberries

Gooseberries (1898)

Life , Death , Autumn , Freedom

“When a person hasn’t in him that which is higher and stronger than all external influences, it is enough for him to catch a good cold in order to lose his equilibrium and begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog’s bark in every sound.”

Anton Chekhov

A Dreary Story or A Tedious Story (1889)

Dogs , Bird , Personality

“Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.”

Anton Chekhov

Difficult People https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chekhov/anton/c51wif/chapter2.html (1886)

Lie , Nature

“To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!”

Anton Chekhov

Act II
The Three Sisters (1901)

“Grigory Petrovitch, let us weep, let us weep with joy!”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

he said in a thin voice, and then at once burst out laughing in a loud bass guffaw. "Ho-ho-ho! This is a fine daughter-in-law for you too! Everything is in its place in her; all runs smoothly, no creaking, the mechanism works well, lots of screws in it."
Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 3, pp. 193-4

Joy

“Tell me, pleez, my sawl, when will I live like human, that is, to work and not to be in need? Now I work, and I'm in need, and I spoil my reputation by the need to write bullshit.”

Anton Chekhov

Скажи, пожалюста, душя моя, когда я буду жить по-человечески, т. е. работать и не нуждаться? Теперь я и работаю, и нуждаюсь, и порчу свою репутацию необходимостью работать херовое.
Letter to the Alexander Chekhov (April 14, 1887)
Letters

“I should think that for one who has tasted the joys of creation, no other pleasure could exist.”

Anton Chekhov The Seagull

Anna to Trigorin, Act I
The Seagull (1896)
Original: (ru) Но, я думаю, кто испытал наслаждение творчества, для того уже все другие наслаждения не существуют.

Pleasure , Joy , Thinking