Anton Chekhov Quotes

279 Sourced Quotes

Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
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
By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.

Anton Chekhov
Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.

Anton Chekhov
Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.

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

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

Anton Chekhov
I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

Anton Chekhov
Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty.

Anton Chekhov
It's very hard, feeling that you're no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.

Anton Chekhov
When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
Science is the most important, the most magnificent, and the most necessary element of life.

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

Anton Chekhov
Tell me what you want, and I will tell you what manner of man you are.

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

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.

Anton Chekhov
It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
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
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.

Anton Chekhov