Top 183 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Surgeons - Page 2

Being able to influence the outcome, being able to do something about it, to be able to stop the bleeding. You're not being useful if you're just standing there going "Oh, that's awful!" You're only useful if you actually do something about it and I think that goes for everything. If you actually do something about what's in front of you, then you are actually contributing and you haven't got time to be self-centred or sorry for yourself. You should be doing something about the person you really should feel sorry for.

Genetics loads the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

Early on in my life I comprehended that death is the most tragic event in our life. Events of early Monday July 14, 1958 [Coup in Iraq] had convinced me that hate is the most destructive force in our life.

Having the USDA design your food pyramid is like having Al Capone do your taxes.

Keep your analysis pure and virtuous.

[The heart is] really a fascinating organ. It's about the only organ in the body that you can really witness its function. Doing things. And so on. Some of the other organs you can witness, like the intestines, will have this sort of peristaltic motion. But nothing that can compare with the activity of the human heart.

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse.

Length of saying makes languor of hearing.

The ordinary patient goes to his doctor because he is in pain or some other discomfort and wants to be comfortable again; he is not in pursuit of the ideal of health in any direct sense. The doctor on the other hand wants to discover the pathological condition and control it if he can. The two are thus to some degree at cross purposes from the first, and unless the affair is brought to an early and happy conclusion this diversion of aims is likely to become more and more serious as the case goes on.

Life is the journey between darkness of the womb and darkness of the grave.

The various systems of doctrine that have held dominion over man have been demonstrated to be true beyond all question by rationalists of such power-to name only a few-as Aquinas and Calvin and Hegel and Marx. Guided by these master hands the intellect has shown itself more deadly than cholera or bubonic plague and far more cruel. The incompatibility with one another of all the great systems of doctrine might surely be have expected to provoke some curiosity about their nature.

I think plans failing is a really interesting question. I've been on a long journey. I'm 54 now and that's seriously old. I hope I still have heaps of years to go. Every day there's new success and some failures. But believe you me you can always get better - but things don't always go how you'd expect all the time. What you have to do is pick yourself up and keep going. That's part of life.

We distrust our heart too much, and our head not enough.

I discovered that the most dangerous mask is the one worn by intelligent people because they are clever at their disguise.

A woman reasons by telegraph, and his [a man's] stage-coach reasoning cannot keep pace with hers.

The second thing to be striven for is intuition. This sounds an impossibility, for who can control that small quiet monitor? But intuition is only interference from experience stored and not actively recalled.

Sport...teaches life's lessons. But there's no substitute, in my book, for education, because that gives you choice.

Physical pain is not a simple affair of an impulse, travelling at a fixed rate along a nerve. It is the resultant of a conflict between a stimulus and the whole individual.

Darkness is where we begin and where we end. We don't usually see light traveling in darkness of space because we only can see its reflection on substance.

Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.

The greatest inheritance that a man hath is the liberty of his person, for all others are accessory to it.

God knows the angel's wings must have been over us in view of the terrible mortality in all other camps up an down this line which seemed to be being built in bones.

It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the painter or sculptor. ... That proposition does not admit of discussion. It is a product of the intellectual innocence which I think we surgeons may fairly claim to possess, and which is happily not inconsistent with a quite adequate worldly wisdom.

In the performance of our duty one feeling should direct us; the case we should consider as our own, and we should ask ourselves, whether, placed under similar circumstances, we should choose to submit to the pain and danger we are about to inflict.

I have little tolerance for incompetence, sloppy thinking, and laziness.

Drawing is like the first kiss. It carries within it the deepest emotion and the challenge of the first step. It is the first cry after birth

The best motto for a long march is 'Don't grumble. Plug on.

We are more conscious that a person is in the wrong when the wrong concerns ourselves.

So much goes into doing a transplant operation. All the way from preparing the patient, to procuring the donor. It's like being an astronaut. The astronaut gets all the credit, he gets the trip to the moon, but he had nothing to do with the creation of the rocket, or navigating the ship. He's the privileged one who gets to drive to the moon. I feel that way in some of these more difficult operations, like the heart transplant.

The fundamental act of medical care is assumption of responsibility. Surgery has assumed responsibility for disease which is largely acute, local or traumatic. This is responsibility for the entire range of injuries and wounds, local infections, benign and malignant tumors, as well as a large fraction of those pathologic processes and anomalies which are localized in the organs of the body. The study of surgery is a study of these diseases, the conditions and details of their care.

Friendship is the ideal; friends are the reality; reality always remains far apart from the ideal.

I find I'm luckier when I work harder.

It is attention, more than any difference between minds and men.-In this is the source of poetic genius, and of the genius of discovery in science.-It was that led Newton to the invention of fluxions, and the discovery of gravitation, and Harvey to find out the circulation of the blood, and Davy to those views which laid the foundation of modern chemistry.

We want our friend as a man of talent, less because he has talent than because he is our friend.

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.

Interest, ambition, fortune, time, temper, love, all kill friendship.

The city does not take away, neither does the country give, solitude; solitude is within us.

Whole libraries can be filled with the papers written about cancer and its causes, but the contents of these papers fit on one little library visiting card.

My father's saying, The harder you work, the luckier you get.

In youth one has tears without grief; in age, griefs without tears

Let us pray! God is just, he tries us; God is pitiful, he will comfort us; let us pray!

It almost alarms me how free I feel on the ice. I don't think about the hospital or the groceries or the kids--I'm just in touch with myself. It's exciting when your whole body is moving in synchronous motion.

As long as we love, we lend to the beloved object qualities of mind and heart which we deprive him of when the day of misunderstanding arrives.

[On her wearing pants:] The greatest sorrows from which women suffer today are those physical, moral and mental ones, that are caused by their unhygienic manner of dressing! The want of the ballot is but a toy by comparison.

The movement of Pakistan which the Quaid-e-Azam launched was ethical in inspiration and ideological in content. The story of this movement is a story of the ideals of equality, fraternity and social and economic justice struggling against the forces of domination, exploitation, intolerance and tyranny.

The fundamental activity of medical science is to determine the ultimate causation of disease.

The means by which I preserve my own health are, temperance, early rising, and spunging the body every morning with cold water, a practice I have pursued for thirty years ; and though I go from this heated theatre into the squares of the Hospital, in the severest winter nights, with merely silk stockings on my legs, yet I scarcely ever have a cold.

Cursed in earth and subdued by death, man found himself beset by time, and his instincts put to the test. Only then, he realized that with love he could survive, and that for a certain purpose he would toil. For those whom my love can not immune from death, are dedicated these paintings, in the hope they may express in drawing the reality of a resonant mind.

The truth is far beyond what we can see. Therefore my art is an invitation to comprehend this fact.

Creative ideas are often attacked because people oppose change or do not understand new concepts.

...Lag...occurred between an initial discovery and its effective clinical application. We analyzed 111 such lags: 8% amounted to 0.1 to 1 year; another 18% were 1 to 10 years; 17% (lagged) 11-20 years;...39% (lagged) 21-50 years; only 18% required more than 50 years for application.

I would like to think that Ive left the world of cardiovascular surgery better than when I found it. That would be a suitable epitaph.

Life is no brief candle but a splendid torch made to burn ever more brightly.

Collectively the media; the meat, oil, and dairy industries; most prominent chefs and cookbook authors; and our own government are not presenting accurate advice about the healthiest way to eat.

Nothing is known in our profession by guess; and I do not believe, that from the first dawn of medical science to the present moment, a single correct idea has ever emanated from conjecture: it is right therefore, that those who are studying their profession should be aware that there is no short road to knowledge; and that observation on the diseased living, examination of the dead, and experiments upon living animals, are the only sources of true knowledge; and that inductions from these are the sole bases of legitimate theory.

The man abandoned by his friends, one after another, without just cause, will acquire, the reputation of being hard to please, changeable, ungrateful, unsociable.

I'll remind you one more time, I've treated a lot of vegans for heart disease.

You [men] are our protectors, is not true; for if you were, who would there be to protect us from?

Studying music encourages self-discipline and diligence, traits that carry over into intellectual pursuits and that lead to effective study and work habits. An association of music and math has, in fact, long been noted. Creating and performing music promotes self-expression and provides self-gratification while giving pleasure to others. In medicine, increasing published reports demonstrate that music has a healing effect on patients. For all these reasons, it deserves strong support in our educational system, along with the other arts, the sciences, and athletics.

I never say of an operation that it is without danger.