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Anton Chekhov

287 quotes

“The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ah, but ignorance is better. At least then there's hope.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A woman can only become a man’s friend in three stages: first, she’s an agreeable acquaintance, then a mistress, and only after that a friend.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make?”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face, and curls combed forward on his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor; as he talked his mouth worked on one side, and there was always an expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kukin's funeral took place on Tuesday in Moscow, Olenka returned home on Wednesday, and as soon as she got indoors, she threw herself on her bed and sobbed so loudly that it could be heard next door, and in the street. "Poor darling!" the neighbours said, as they crossed themselves. "Olga Semyonovna, poor darling! How she does take on!”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When she had seen the last of Sasha, she returned home, contented and serene, brimming over with love; her face, which had grown younger during the last six months, smiled and beamed; people meeting her looked at her with pleasure.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When she put him to bed, she would stay a long time making the Cross over him and murmuring a prayer; then she would go to bed and dream of that far-away misty future when Sasha would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have a big house of his own with horses and a carriage, would get married and have children.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was introduced and first had to talk to her, what struck me most of all was her rare and beautiful name--Ariadne. It suited her so wonderfully! She was a brunette, very thin, very slender, supple, elegant, and extremely graceful, with refined and exceedingly noble features. Her eyes were shining, too, but her brother's shone with a cold sweetness, mawkish as sugar-candy, while hers had the glow of youth, proud and beautiful. She conquered me on the first day of our acquaintance”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ariadne's voice, her walk, her hat, even her footprints on the sandy bank where she used to angle for gudgeon, filled me with delight and a passionate hunger for life.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My love was pathetic and was soon noticed by every one--my father, the neighbours, and the peasants--and they all sympathised with me. When I stood the workmen ... would bow and say: "May the Kotlovitch young lady be your bride, please God!”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remember helping her to get on the bicycle one evening, and she looked so lovely that I felt as though I were burning my hands when I touched her.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But she was incapable of really loving as I did, for she was cold and already somewhat corrupted. There was a demon in her, whispering to her day and night that she was enchanting, adorable; and, having no definite idea for what object she was created, or for what purpose life had been given her, she never pictured herself in the future except as very wealthy and distinguished ... of a perfect swarm of counts, princes, ambassadors, celebrated painters and artists, all of them adoring her and in ecstasies over her beauty and her dresses. . . .”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ariadne was herself aware that she was lacking in something. She was vexed and more than once I saw her cry. Another time--can you imagine it?--all of a sudden she embraced me and kissed me. It happened in the evening on the river-bank, and I saw by her eyes that she did not love me, but was embracing me from curiosity, to test herself and to see what came of it. And I felt dreadful. I took her hands and said to her in despair: "These caresses without love cause me suffering!" - "What a queer fellow you are!" she said with annoyance, and walked away.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After this conversation I lay awake all night and thought of shooting myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all up.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to believe that in his struggle with nature the genius of man has struggled with physical love too, as with an enemy, and that, if he has not conquered it, he has at least succeeded in tangling it in a net-work of illusions of brotherhood and love; and for me, at any rate, it is no longer a simple instinct of my animal nature as with a dog or a toad, but is real love, and every embrace is spiritualised by a pure impulse of the heart and respect for the woman.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In reality, a disgust for the animal instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of my nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as natural and inevitable in our day as my ears' not being able to move and my not being covered with fur?”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Seeing me, she uttered a cry of joy, and probably, if we had not been in the park, would have thrown herself on my neck. She pressed my hands warmly and laughed; and I laughed too and almost cried with emotion. Questions followed, of the village, of my father, whether I had seen her brother, and so on. She insisted on my looking her straight in the face, and asked if I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels, the picnics. . . .”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She used the formal mode of address in speaking to Lubkov, and when she was going up to bed she said good-night to him exactly as she did to me, and their rooms were on different floors. All this made me hope that it was all nonsense, and that there was no sort of love affair between them, and I felt at ease when I met him. And when one day he asked me for the loan of three hundred roubles, I gave it to him with the greatest pleasure.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every day we spent in enjoying ourselves and in nothing but enjoying ourselves; we strolled in the park, we ate, we drank. Every day there were conversations...”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At home in the country I used to feel ashamed to meet the peasants when I was fishing or on a picnic party on a working day; here too I was ashamed at the sight of the footmen, the coachmen, and the workmen who met us. It always seemed to me they were looking at me and thinking: "Why are you doing nothing?”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I'm fond of the winter; I'm fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest frosts, it's particularly snug at home. It's pleasant to put on one's fur jacket and felt overboots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden or in the yard, or to read in a well warmed room, to sit in my father's study before the open fire, to wash in my country bath-house.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious of nothing but rapture. To hold in one's arms a young and lovely body, with bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from sleep, and to remember that she was there--she, my Ariadne!-- ... I realised, as before, that Ariadne did not love me. But she wanted to be really in love, she was afraid of solitude”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute, apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an impulse such as makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle its antennae. She was deceitful with me, with the footman, with the porter, with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances; not one conversation, not one meeting, took place without affectation and pretense.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro, zealously conning his anatomy. ... In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat on a stool the girl who shared his room--Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very pale with mild grey eyes. Sitting with bent back she was busy embroidering with red thread the collar of a man's shirt. . . . The clock in the passage struck two drowsily, yet the little room had not been put to rights for the morning....”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Colonel knew by experience that in women like his wife, Sofya Lvovna, after a little too much wine, turbulent gaiety was followed by hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they got home, instead of being able to sleep, he would have to be administering compresses and drops.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They reached home. Getting into her warm, soft bed, and pulling the bed-clothes over her, Sofya Lvovna recalled the dark church, the smell of incense, and the figures by the columns, and she felt frightened at the thought that these figures would be standing there all the while she was asleep. The early service would be very, very long; then there would be "the hours," then the mass, then the service of the day. "But of course there is a God--there certainly is a God; and I shall have to die, so that sooner or later one must think of one's soul, of eternal life”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And next day she met her lover, and again Sofya Lvovna drove about the town alone in a hired sledge thinking about her aunt.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have seen a great many houses in my time, little and big, new and old, built of stone and of wood, but of one house I have kept a very vivid memory. It was, properly speaking, rather a cottage than a house--a tiny cottage of one story, with three windows”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen, in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a mother-of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson. Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I understood, and my heart was heavy.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist's shop all over the house.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the table of his wife's room under the box of stationery he found a telegram, and glanced at it casually. It was addressed to his wife, care of his mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel . . . . The doctor did not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign language, apparently English. "Who is this Michel? Why Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her mother?”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Later on he had met the young man himself at his mother-in-law's. And that was at the time when his wife had taken to being very often absent and coming home at four or five o'clock in the morning, and was constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept refusing to do; and a continual feud went on in the house which made him feel ashamed to face the servants.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven years that he had been living with her, all that remained in his memory was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet, which certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and even now it seemed as though he still had from those old embraces the feeling of lace and silk upon his hands and face--and nothing more. Nothing more--that is, not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies--brazen, treacherous lies.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He remembered how in his father's house in the village a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house and would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset things; so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into his life and made complete havoc of it.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seemed that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this woman.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are reckoning on my not knowing English. No, I don't know it; but I have a dictionary. That telegram is from Riss; he drinks to the health of his beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let us leave that," the doctor went on hurriedly. "I don't in the least want to reproach you or make a scene. We've had scenes and reproaches enough; it's time to make an end of them.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is what I want to say to you: you are free, and can live as you like." There was a silence. She began crying quietly. "I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretences," Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued. "If you love that young man, love him; if you want to go abroad to him, go.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his secret meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish object in them.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nikolay Yevgrafitch himself in the photograph looked such a guileless soul, such a kindly, good fellow, so open and simple-hearted; his whole face was relaxed in the naïve, good-natured smile of a divinity student, and he had had the simplicity to believe that that company of beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart is cold and loveless.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to hire horses and carts to move next day to town. Profiting by the absence of her severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had for a long time been sitting in the young man's room. Next day the painter was going away, and she had a great deal to say to him. She kept talking, talking, and yet she felt that she had not said a tenth of what she wanted to say. With her eyes full of tears, she gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at it with rapture and sadness.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his overhanging eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass: "I cannot marry." "Why not?" Katya asked softly. "Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage is out of the question. An artist must be free." "But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?" "I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general." ". . . Famous authors and painters have never married.”
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) said by 1904 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source