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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
(17 Jan 1860 - 2 Jul 1904)
Russian playwright and physician remembered for short stories, novels and plays including Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Although he studied medicine but practiced little. He died at the early age of 44, of tuberculosis.
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Science Quotes by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (11 quotes)
[In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
In short story, Rothschild’s Fiddle (1894). Collected in The Black Monk and Other Stories (1915), 138.
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 Pavlovich Chekhov
In letter to A.S. Suvorin (18 Oct 1888).
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 the evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Letter to M. V. Kiselev (14 Jan 1887). In L. S. Friedland (ed.), Anton Chekhov: Letters on the Short Story (1967).
Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
ĵIvanovĵ (1887), Act I.
I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
In letter to A.S. Suvorin (11 Sep 1888).
If a lot of cures are suggested for a disease, it means that the disease is incurable.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard (1904), Act 1. Trans. Elisaveta Fen.
Only entropy comes easy.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Quoted in Ben Greenman, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Celebrity Chekhov: Stories by Anton Chekhov (2010), xiii.
There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
In Anton Chekhov, S. S. Koteliansky (trans.) and Leonard Woolf (trans.), Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921), 18.
Under the flag of science, art, and persecuted freedom of thought, Russia would one day be ruled by toads and crocodiles the like of which were unknown even in Spain at the time of the Inquisition.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Under the flag of science, art, and persecuted freedom of thought, Russia would one day be ruled by toads and crocodiles the like of which were unknown even in Spain at the time of the Inquisition.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean—that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses—that is science.
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
In Anton Chekhov, S. S. Koteliansky (trans.) and Leonard Woolf (trans.), Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921), 104.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
