Few writers have captured the profound complexity of human nature with such elegant simplicity as Anton Chekhov. The Russian master of short fiction and drama possessed an extraordinary ability to illuminate the depths of the human condition through seemingly ordinary moments and conversations. While Chekhov is celebrated for his literary masterpieces like “The Cherry Orchard” and “Uncle Vanya,” his philosophical insights extend far beyond the pages of his stories and plays. Anton Chekhov quotes reveal a writer who was not only a keen observer of human behavior but also a compassionate philosopher who understood the delicate balance between hope and despair, love and loneliness, dreams and reality.
These timeless observations continue to resonate with readers more than a century after his death because they speak to universal truths about existence, creativity, and the search for meaning.
Anton Chekhov quotes offer profound wisdom wrapped in accessible language, making complex emotions and situations feel both deeply personal and universally understood.
Whether you’re a literature enthusiast, a creative professional seeking inspiration, or someone navigating life’s inevitable challenges, Chekhov’s words provide both comfort and clarity in an often confusing world.
Anton Chekhov Quotes
You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible
2. Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
3. If you want to work on your art, work on your life.
4. A woman can become a man’s friend only in the following stages – first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.
5. I have the feeling that I’ve seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.
6. The snow has not yet left the earth but spring is already asking to enter your heart.
7. Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.
8. Time will pass, and we shall go away for ever, and we shall be forgotten, our faces will be forgotten, our voices, and how many there were of us; but our sufferings will pass into joy for those who will live after us, happiness and peace will be established upon earth, and they will remember kindly and bless those who have lived before.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
12. Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.
13. You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.
14. The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy…
15. Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport.
16. Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.
17. In Russia there is no philosophy, but philosophize everything, even the small fry.
18. The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.
19. How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
20. 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.
21. An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.
22. When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.
23. 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.
24. Writers are as jealous as pigeons.
25. Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.
26. 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.
27. I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense….
28. To live simply to die is by no means amusing, but to live with the knowledge that you will die before your time, that’s really is idiotic.
29. One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.
30. It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
31. In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don’t feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger – a stranger… A stranger, and lonely…
32. I am dying. I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time.
33. The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.
34. There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.
35. In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness…. The expanses are so great that the little man hasn’t the resources to orient himself…. This is what I think about Russian suicides.
36. Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever…. Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.
37. Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It’s a lucky thing it’s not salty.
38. Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general senseand the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reasons lie not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
39. Posterity will say as usual: “In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past.
40. There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.
41. In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish – that is their strength.
42. In all my life I never met anyone so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike. I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold and you don’t seem to understand what I say.
43. To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.
44. I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.
45. Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.
46. When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.
47. It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.
48. Wisdom…. comes not from age, but from education and learning.
49. I expect I shall be a student to the end of my days.
50. Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.
51. 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.
52. A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.
53. Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. … It is comprehensible when I write: “The man sat on the grass,” because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: “The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.” The brain can’t grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.
54. When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can’t be cured.
55. We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
56. Man will become better when you show him what he is like.
57. In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because–I don’t know why.
58. You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don’t want to understand you.
59. The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
60. 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.
61. The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.
62. One must speak about serious things seriously.
63. Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive… Everything that is unattainable for us now will one day be near and clear… But we must work.
64. It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.
65. My mistress has come home; at last I’ve seen her. Now I’m ready to die.
66. That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
67. In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.
68. When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder – that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. … The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make.
69. An enormously vast field lies between “God exists” and “there is no God.” The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.
70. There isn’t a Monday that would not cede its place to Tuesday.
71. I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train or a steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him. I consider his philosophy won’t last long, however. It’s more showy than convincing.
72. It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.
73. 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.
74. Advertising is the very essence of democracy.
75. People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
76. It’s worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.
77. You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!
78. Once you’ve married, be strict but just with your wife, don’t allow her to forget herself, and when a misunderstanding arises, say: “Don’t forget that I made you happy.
79. Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure.
80. If you cry ”Forward” you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?
81. 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.
82. Oh, I don’t object, of course, to cutting wood from necessity, but why destroy the forests? The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever. And why? Because men are too lazy and stupid to stoop down and pick up their fuel from the ground.
83. 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.
84. What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.
85. The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
86. You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.
87. A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.
88. If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.
89. The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.
90. There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.
91. 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.
92. Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.
93. When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you’ll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don’t shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.
94. The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
95. In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won”t be there to see it – but it”s why we live, why we work. It”s why we suffer. We”re creating it. That”s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.
96. Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let’s have a philosophical conversation.
97. Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.
98. 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.
99. No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand… Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
100. Let the things that happen on the stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.
101. These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
102. I agree that one can’t dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author’s own conscience.
103. Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice…. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.
104. 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.
105. When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself – hence the war with what he does not understand.
106. What’s the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country; the people have no morals; and the boredom!
107. Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!
108. One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
109. 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.
110. When one sees one of the romantic creatures before him he imagines he is looking at some holy being, so wonderful that its one breath could dissolve him in a sea of a thousand charms and delights; but if one looks into the soul — it’s nothing but a common crocodile.
111. In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.
112. 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.
113. If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure.
114. He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.
115. The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.
116. A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.
117. To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face.
118. 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?
119. Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.
120. You will not become a saint through other people’s sins.
121. Try to reason about love, and you will lose your reason.
122. Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?
123. There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.
124. Only entropy comes easy.
125. Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.
126. If you wish women to love you be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter & women fell in love with him.
127. Love, respect, and friendship do unite a people as well as a common hatred does.
128. ..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It’s still better than nothing.
129. He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
130. 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.
131. 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.
132. 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 . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.
133. An artist’s flair is sometimes worth a scientist’s brains.
134. 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.
135. I often wonder: suppose we could begin life over again, knowing what we were doing? Suppose we could use one life, already ended, as a sort of rough draft for another? I think that every one of us would try, more than anything else, not to repeat himself, at the very least he would rearrange his manner of life, he would make sure of rooms like these, with flowers and light … I have a wife and two daughters, my wife’s health is delicate and so on and so on, and if I had to begin life all over again I would not marry. … No, no!
136. It is the writer’s business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.
137. Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it’s unimaginable.
138. …and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.
139. It’s immoral to steal, but you can take things.
140. 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.
141. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.
142. The time’s come: there’s a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up….It’s going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work….I’m going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years’ time every man and woman will be working.
143. There are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate.
144. Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imageryYou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.
145. I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book…. One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.
146. You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist.
147. To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
148. Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.
149. There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live … we must work, just work!
150. I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines.
151. 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.
152. Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life’s become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.
153. The more cultured a man, the less fortunate he is.
154. Even while lying, you’ll be believed if you speak with authority.
155. It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees – this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.
156. I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.
157. Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.
158. The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.
159. Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
160. The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.
161. Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.
162. To advise is not to compel.
163. 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.
164. I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.
165. We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.
166. 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.
167. Not everyone knows how to be silent or to leave in good time. It happens that even people of good breeding fail to notice that their presence provokes in the weary or preoccupied host a feeling akin to hatred, and that this feeling is tensely concealed and covered up with lies.
168. I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.
169. Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something.
170. In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.
171. I don’t like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.
172. My holy of holies is the human body.
173. A litterateur is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer. . . . He is just like an ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter, because of his fastidiousness or from a wish to give pleasure to his readers, were to describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroad contractors.
174. Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.
175. The past,’ he thought, ‘is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.’ And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
176. One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.
177. You’ve only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I think: “Oh Lord, you’ve given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.
178. Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there’s an unfinished novel waiting for me.
179. Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood!
180. People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
181. Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
182. A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.
183. If I had listened to the critics I’d have died drunk in the gutter.
184. When asked, “Why do you always wear black?”, he said, “I am mourning for my life.
185. Life has gone by as if I never lived.
186. When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.
187. It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
188. 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.
189. If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom–there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am lost, I am lost; there is no doubt of that.
190. I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.
191. 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.
192. He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.
193. It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.
194. Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.
195. It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn’t marry the right person.
196. We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of.
197. 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.
198. It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.
199. Indeed, in Russia there is a terrible poverty of facts, and a terrible abundance of reflections of all sorts.
200. I am writing a play which I probably will not finish until the end of November. I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, four acts, a landscape (view of the lake), lots of talk on literature, little action and tons of love.
201. No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.
202. Only those young people can be accepted as healthy who refuse to be reconciled with the old order and foolishly or wisely struggle against it – such is the will of nature…
203. 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.
204. 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.
205. You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly.
206. People should be beautiful in every way – in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.
207. 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.
208. 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.
209. It’s very hard, feeling that you’re no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.
210. 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.
211. Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.
212. A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.
213. If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.
214. The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
215. But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life!
216. I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.
217. Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
218. I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
219. If you fear loneliness, then don’t get married.
220. A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.
221. When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.
222. People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.
223. A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.
224. Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.
225. we all have too many wheels, screws and valves to judge each other on first impressions or one or two pointers. I don’t understand you, you don’t understand me and we don’t understand ourselves.
226. Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business.
227. I’m in mourning for my life.
228. When you’re thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that’s faith; when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that’s science.
229. Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
230. [Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.
231. If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: “Nothing passes away.” I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.
232. Everyone has the same God; only people differ.
233. He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.
234. To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.
235. If there’s any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.
236. Man is what he believes.
237. 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.
238. Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given.
239. In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!
240. If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you – it will come out of that wall.
241. When a woman isn’t beautiful, people always say, ‘You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.’
242. Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.
243. 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.
244. If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
245. Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
246. The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.
247. I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is…like fireworks.
248. And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!
249. If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It’s better to live somehow than not at all.
250. 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.
251. If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.
252. Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.
253. I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.
254. 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.
255. ..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It’s still better than nothing.
256. I should think I’m going to be a perpetual student.
257. 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.
258. I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don’t like. No other criterion exists for me.
259. By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.
260. A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.
261. Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come fromsuch 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.
262. To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people’s consciousness, the people’s conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen–this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.
263. Anna Petrovna (to Shabelsky): You can’t make a simple joke without an injection of venom. You are a poisonous man. Joking apart, Count, you’re very poisonous. It’s hideously boring to live with you. You’re always grumpy, complaining, you find everyone bad, good for nothing. Tell me frankly, Count, did you ever speak well of anyone?
264. Eyes – the head’s chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.
265. 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.
266. 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.
267. The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren’t aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.
268. 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.
269. People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
270. For God’s sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch.
271. This life of ours…human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up—no more flower.
272. 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.
273. If only one tooth aches, rejoice that not all of them ache…. If your wife betrays you, be glad that she betrayed only you and not the nation.
274. [In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.
275. 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.
276. One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
277. The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issuesnot from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.
278. Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write and would write with great pleasureEither I am a fool and a self-conceited person, or I am a being capable of becoming a good writer; I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me-whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions.
279. Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.
280. 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. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe. … What a terrible future!
281. It is as acceptable now to love the wives of others as it is to smoke their cigars and read their books.
282. I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey – is it possible that’s attractive to women?
283. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
284. I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.
285. I’m the seagull. No, that’s not it. I’m an actress. That’s it.
286. Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
287. The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
288. Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.
289. I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.
290. 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.
291. If you cry ‘forward’, you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.
292. 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.
293. Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?
294. 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.
295. Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.
296. Faith is a capacity of the spirit. It is like talent: you have to be born with it.
297. Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?
298. Flies purify the air, and plays – the morals.
299. Idea for a short story. The shore of a lake, a young girl who’s spent her whole life beside it, a girl like you She loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she’s happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.
300. 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.
301. Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
302. Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.
303. 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.
304. Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
305. What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?
306. 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.
307. 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 hardand tortuous to write a bad one.
308. For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.
309. 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.
310. People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.
311. But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: “My work is literature.”
312. Our pride and self-importance are European, while our development and actions are Asiatic.
313. Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.
314. “Do you know,” Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, “for how many years I shall be read? Seven.” “Why seven?” Bunin asked. “Well,” Chekhov answered, “seven and a half then.”
315. When an actor has money he doesn’t send letters, he sends telegrams.
316. It’s easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.
317. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.
318. The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.
319. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.
320. Three o’clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can’t sleep, I am so happy.
321. Write only of what is important and eternal.
322. The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.
323. You look boldly ahead; isn’t it only that you don’t see or divine anything terrible in the future; because life is still hidden from your young eyes.
324. You don’t understand, you fool’ says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. ‘You’ve never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years… You just think I’m a mad person who has thrown his life away… Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there’s no way of getting it out of him.
325. To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!
326. Who keeps the tavern and serves up the drinks? The peasant. Who squanders and drinks up money belonging to the peasant commune, the school, the church? The peasant. Who would steal from his neighbor, commit arson, and falsely denounce another for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.
327. A grimy fly can soil the entire wall and a small, dirty little act can ruin the entire proceedings.
328. Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.
329. In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.
330. The teacher must be an actor, an artist,passionately in love with his work.
331. They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.
332. There is nothing new in art except talent.
333. If one wants to lead a good life, A HUMAN LIFE, one must work.
334. Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
335. 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.
336. And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.
337. I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it’s tobacco, then let it be tobacco.
338. Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields.
339. Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.
340. An actress without talent, forty years old, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than the actress.
341. Even in Siberia there is happiness.
342. 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.
343. My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of selecting the important moments from the trivial ones. . . . It’s about time for writers – particularly those who are genuine artists – to recognize that in this world you cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does not understand everything, and that alone will represent a major contribution to the way people think, a long leap forward.
344. A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.
345. 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.
346. Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.
347. 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.
348. Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I’m tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don’t understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife’s illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin… My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture.
349. The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.
350. Women can’t forgive failure.
351. In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions. Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.
352. What truth? You see where truth is, and where untruth is, but I seem to have lost my sight and see nothing. You boldly settle all important questions, but tell me, dear, isn’t it because you’re young, because you haven’t had time to suffer till you settled a single one of your questions? You boldly look forward, isn’t it because you cannot foresee or expect anything terrible, because so far life has been hidden from your young eyes? You are bolder, more honest, deeper than we are, but think only, be just a little magnanimous, and have mercy on me.
353. To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.
354. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one’s time, the better part of one’s strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.
355. Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
356. I am now and have always been a stranger to the realm of practical matters.
357. Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far asblather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.
358. The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
359. We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.
360. 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.
361. 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.
362. It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.
363. To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.
364. The sea has neither meaning nor pity.
365. The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
366. 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.
367. 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.
368. Once a man gets a fixed idea, there’s nothing to be done.
369. Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.
370. Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.
371. I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean – wherever my imagination ranges.
372. There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
373. There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
374. It’s not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.
375. All I wanted was to say honestly to people: ‘Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!’ The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: ‘Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!’
376. This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people’s ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don’t want to know–which means that for twenty-five years he’s been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!
377. It’s better to live down a scandal than to ruin one’s life.
378. 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.
379. It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne.
380. If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
381. What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.
382. You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.
383. 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.
384. 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.
385. 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.
386. The stupider the peasant, the better the horse understands him.
387. There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.
388. A person loves to talk about his illnesses although that is the least interesting part of his life.
389. The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.
390. 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.
391. Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.
392. 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.
393. An artist must only judge of what he understands, his field is just as limited as that of any other specialist… That in his sphere there are no questions, but only answers, can only be maintained by those who have never written and have had no experience of thinking in images.
394. One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions.
395. Brevity – the sister of talent.
396. I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, won’t in my sky every day…
397. I’ve noticed that people who get married cease to be curious.
398. 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.
399. 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.
400. Only one who loves can remember so well.
401. In my head there is a whole army of people asking to be let out and waiting for the word of command.
402. From here, far away, people seem very good, and that is natural, for in going away into the country we are not hiding from people but from our vanity, which in town among people is unjust and active beyond measure.
403. 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.
404. What a delight it is to respect people!
405. Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double-bass, and a fly settles on his flanks and tickles and buzzes. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: ‘Look, I too am living on the earth. See, I can buzz, too, buzz about anything.’
406. 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.
407. He who doesn’t know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others’ successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs.
408. If you can’t distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn’t undertake philanthropic work.
409. [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.
410. Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.
411. Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.
412. We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I’ve never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it’ll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it’ll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.
413. Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly.
414. Reason and justice tell me there’s more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.
415. An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.
416. 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.
417. 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—
418. 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.
419. Write, write, write-till your fingers break.
420. God’s world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!
421. In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yetappeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.
422. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
423. I can’t accept “our nervous age,” since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.
424. Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
425. A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.
426. The more refined one is, the more unhappy.
427. All saints have past and all sinners have a future.
428. If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.
430. 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.
431. 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.
432. And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.
433. All the great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ignorant and as indelicate as generals, because they feel secure of impunity.
434. By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress.
435. Never bring a cannon on stage in Act I unless you intend to fire it by the last act.
436. Solomon made a big mistake when he asked for wisdom.
437. It is always “Youth, youth,” when there is nothing else to be said.
Conclusion
The enduring appeal of Anton Chekhov quotes lies in their remarkable ability to distill life’s most complex emotions into moments of crystalline clarity. Unlike flowery proclamations or grand philosophical statements, Chekhov’s observations feel intimate and honest, as if shared by a wise friend who truly understands the weight of living.
His words remind us that beauty can be found in the mundane, that suffering often leads to deeper understanding, and that the most profound truths are often discovered in quiet moments of reflection rather than dramatic revelations.
As you reflect on these insights from one of literature’s greatest minds, remember that Anton Chekhov quotes are not merely words to admire but invitations to examine your own life with greater depth and compassion.
Chekhov believed in the transformative power of art and human connection, and his quotes serve as gentle guides toward a more thoughtful, empathetic way of being in the world.
In a time when quick fixes and shallow solutions dominate our cultural landscape, the patient wisdom found in Chekhov’s words offers a refreshing return to substance, nuance, and the enduring power of genuine human insight.
