Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people’s altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to justify and conceal one’s own rottenness and moral poverty is only possible for a very vain, base, and nasty creature.

— Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov Quotes

My holy of holies is the human body.

— 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

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

— Anton Chekhov

Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.

— Anton Chekhov

I have the feeling that I’ve seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.

— Anton Chekhov

Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.

— 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

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

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

— Anton Chekhov

If you can’t distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn’t undertake philanthropic work.

— 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

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure.

— Anton Chekhov

If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.

— Anton Chekhov

Firsts

There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.

— Anton Chekhov

Eyes – the head’s chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.

— Anton Chekhov

To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face.

— Anton Chekhov

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.

— 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

The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.

— 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

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