110+ Anton Chekhov Quotes On Writing, Manners And Tragic

Anton Chekhov was a Russian dramatist and short story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of short fiction in history. He was known for his plays, which often explored the struggles of ordinary people and their search for meaning in a seemingly chaotic world. His works include The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Anton Chekhov on writing, love, manners.

Top 10 Anton Chekhov Quotes

1. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
2. Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
3. Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.
4. What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.
5. 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.
6. There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
7. Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
8. Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Anton Chekhov Image Quotes

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. — Anton Chekhov

What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself. — Anton Chekhov

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality. — Anton Chekhov

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

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible. — Anton Chekhov

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf. — Anton Chekhov

Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it. — Anton Chekhov

To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow! — Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Short Quotes

• Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.
• Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
• To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
• Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.
• People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.
• We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
• Writers are as jealous as pigeons.
• Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.
• If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter
• I'm the seagull. No, that's not it. I'm an actress. That's it.

Anton Chekhov Quotes About Writing

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. — Anton Chekhov

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

Write only of what is important and eternal. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. — Anton Chekhov

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. — 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

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. — 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 hardand tortuous to write a bad one. — Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Quotes About Love

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible. — Anton Chekhov

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. — Anton Chekhov

Love, respect, and friendship do unite a people as well as a common hatred does. — Anton Chekhov

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. — 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

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

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — 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

It is as acceptable now to love the wives of others as it is to smoke their cigars and read their books. — Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Quotes About Manners

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

The more cultured a man, the less fortunate he is. — Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Quotes About Life

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

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. — Anton Chekhov

..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Quotes About Poetic

There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent. — 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

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

Anton Chekhov Quotes About Face

Any idiot can face a crisis, it's the day to day living that wears you out. — Anton Chekhov

To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face — Anton Chekhov

Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out. — Anton Chekhov

Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts. — 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

Anton Chekhov Quotes About Living

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

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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! — Anton Chekhov

Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die. — Anton Chekhov

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 — Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Famous Quotes And Sayings

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. — Anton Chekhov

What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself. — Anton Chekhov

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality. — 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

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

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. — Anton Chekhov

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— — Anton Chekhov

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible. — Anton Chekhov

Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it. — Anton Chekhov

To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow! — Anton Chekhov

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other. — 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

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. — 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

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

[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. — Anton Chekhov

A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend. — Anton Chekhov

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science. — Anton Chekhov

One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work. — Anton Chekhov

Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them. — Anton Chekhov

The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything. — Anton Chekhov

The more refined one is, the more unhappy. — 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

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

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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

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. — Anton Chekhov

I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses. — 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

Even in Siberia there is happiness. — Anton Chekhov

Man is what he believes. — Anton Chekhov

Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person. — Anton Chekhov

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

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious — Anton Chekhov

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

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

There is nothing new in art except talent. — 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

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... — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another. — Anton Chekhov

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man. — 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

There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined. — Anton Chekhov

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. — 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

An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket. — Anton Chekhov

Brevity - the sister of talent. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

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. — 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

In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle. — Anton Chekhov

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured. — Anton Chekhov

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. — 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 always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Anton Chekhov

Life Lessons by Anton Chekhov

1. Anton Chekhov's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and appreciating the small moments in life. He teaches us to savor the beauty of life's simple pleasures, as they often bring us the most joy.
2. Chekhov also reminds us of the power of empathy and compassion. He encourages us to take the time to understand and appreciate the perspectives of others, even if they are different from our own.
3. Finally, Chekhov's work highlights the importance of self-reflection and introspection. He encourages us to take the time to reflect on our own thoughts and feelings in order to better understand ourselves and our place in the world.