Anton Chekhov Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

2. And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life. The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904

3. Even in Siberia there is happiness.

4. Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life...Sasha: In life it's the same.Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life! Ivanov

5. 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.

6. The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. Gooseberries and Other Stories

7. 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. About Love and Other Stories

8. Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.

9. You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

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

11. Science and art,... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,... then they only complicate and encumber life. Five Great Short Stories

12. The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered. The Witch and Other Stories

13. There is nothing good in this world that does not have some filth in its origin.

14. 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.

15. Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why? The Complete Short Novels