Anton Chekhov Quotes

279 Sourced Quotes

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
Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.

Anton Chekhov
Love, friendship, and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.

Anton Chekhov
To begin to live in the present, we must first atone for our past and be finished with it, and we can only atone for it by suffering, by extraordinary, unceasing exertion.

Anton Chekhov
To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
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.

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
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!

Anton Chekhov
Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

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

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her.... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.

Anton Chekhov
A writer must be as objective as a chemist: he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung-heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
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.

Anton Chekhov
People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.

Anton Chekhov
[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.

Anton Chekhov
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

Anton Chekhov
Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.

Anton Chekhov
A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper

Anton Chekhov
Nina: Your play's hard to act, there are no living people in it.
Treplev: Living people! We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams.

Anton Chekhov
We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.

Anton Chekhov
Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.

Anton Chekhov
People should be beautiful in every way—in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts and in their innermost selves.

Anton Chekhov
In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength.

Anton Chekhov
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...

Anton Chekhov
Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.

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

Anton Chekhov
Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?

Anton Chekhov