Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by William Osler - Page 2

It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.

The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.

Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.

To it, more than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had - to this power of settling down to the day's work and trying to do it to the best of one's ability, and letting the future take care of itself.

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.

By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy-indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.

Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem.

Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.

Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.

Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.

Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.

One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.

Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.

I desire no other epitaph - no hurry about it, I may say - than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do.

No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

Beware of people who call you 'Doc.' They rarely pay their bills.

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.

The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.

A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.

The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.

As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.

Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.

Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.

It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men who do its daily work in general practice.

We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.

We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences

The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.

To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.

We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?

Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things; the motto of one is "Prove all things and hold fast that which is good" and of the other "Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old."

To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.

Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.

It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead.

Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.

The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.

It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep: far from it, they are awake - many of them at any rate - to the importance of the scientific study of disease.

The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.

Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.

Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.

When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.

Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.

There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter - loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man. Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.

The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.

Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours.

Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.

Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.

Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.

Nothing is life is more wonderful than faith.

Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.

But whatever you do, take neither yourselves nor your fellow-creatures too seriously. There is tragedy enough in our daily routine, but there is room too for a keen sense of the absurdities and incongruities of life, and in the shifting panorama no one sees better than the doctor the perennial sameness of men’s ways.

Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work.

Throw away all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well. The travelers on the road to success live in the present, heedless of taking thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your wildest ambition.

The very first step toward success in any occupation is to become interested in it. Locke put this in a very happy way when he said, give a pupil "a relish of knowledge" and you put life into his work.

For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him.

Laughter is the music of life.