Anton Chekhov Quotes

279 Sourced Quotes

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
A man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.

Anton Chekhov
Eyes—the head's chief of police. They watch and make mental notes. A blind person is like a city abandoned by the authorities. On sad days they cry. In these carefree times they weep only from tender emotions.

Anton Chekhov
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.

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
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
Medvedenko: Why do you wear black all the time?
Masha: I'm in mourning for my life, I'm unhappy.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

Anton Chekhov
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
As I shall lie in the grave alone, so in fact I live alone.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.

Anton Chekhov
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.

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
It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
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
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.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
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.

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 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.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'

Anton Chekhov
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
Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.

Anton Chekhov
The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.

Anton Chekhov
When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, life consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov