Anton Chekhov: Quotes about life

Anton Chekhov was Russian dramatist, author and physician. Explore interesting quotes on life.

Anton Chekhov: 444 quotes5 likes

“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.”

Ward No. 6

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

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

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

In a Native Corner or At Home (1897)

“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)

“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.”

Episode from a Practice

“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!””

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

“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)