Anton Chekhov Quotes

279 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Anton Chekhov
One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

Anton Chekhov
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
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.

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

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

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
We learn about life not from pluses alone, but from minuses as well.

Anton Chekhov
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
Everything is quiet, peaceful and against it all is only the silent protest of statistics...

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

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

Anton Chekhov
The Lord God has given us vast forests, immense fields, wide horizons; surely we ought to be giants, living in such a country as this.

Anton Chekhov
Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make?

Anton Chekhov
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!

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!

Anton Chekhov
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
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
VERSHININ: Take Copernicus or Columbus, for instance — didn't their discoveries seem useless or ridiculous at first, and some fool's empty nonsense seem the truth?

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn't understand.

Anton Chekhov
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