A Quote by Atul Gawande

Once you start to ask patients about their priorities, you discover what they're living for. Once you uncover that, it helps you, as a doctor, decide what to fight for. And when we do that, we often end up identifying limits to the kind of care that people want. One's assumption is that these people are going to live shorter lives, but what we're doing is protecting quality of life. In doing so, you sometimes end up helping people live longer. Certainly, you help people live better days and with more purpose in their lives.
People try to live their lives without consequences and end up living lives of no consequence.
The America I do want to live in, is seeing how people respond to the victims of Hurricane Harvey. People of all races, all colors, all religions. You don't care what a person looks like, what their beliefs are - I'm helping them, because they are my fellow brother, or because they need my help. That's the America I want to live in. I don't want to live in Charlottesville, where you hate somebody because of the way that they choose to live their life. That's not a place where I want to live.
Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
I mean if it wasn't for Earl Scruggs, guys like me wouldn't be doing what we're doing. I mean, he's changed so many people's lives, honestly. I was thinking about all the thousands of people that live in Nashville, like myself, that there's no reason a guy from New York would end up down there if it wasn't for the sound of Earl Scruggs' banjo coming over the airwaves and just changing my life.
When we, doctors, ask patients what their priorities are if time is short, what we do is we use what is available to us - whether it's geriatric care or palliative care or hospice care - to make sure they're living the kind of life that they want to live.
I think it's fair to set limits on housing benefit, so that people on welfare do not end up able to live in better areas than those doing the right thing by finding work.
It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.
The clubs usually enforce no filming of performances pretty well. I want to know that what I'm doing is in the here and now and it's mine. I absolutely want control over my performances. And it is actually scary to see someone filming you without permission. Like Big Brother is watching. All these cameras don't make up for a life that isn't well-lived! I agree that people don't live in the moment, they instead live to make a name for themselves as "people who are living exciting lives and at great events".
I just see too many people retire and say, 'I'm going to take off, travel, spend time with my family' and they are just miserable. They end up dying. People who work and stay active, and like what they are doing, live longer.
I'm not an example for how people should live their lives. Never in my life would I ever set out to be an example for people on how to live their lives. If you need an example for how to live, then you just shouldn't have been born. Straight up.
When I'm around people who are incredibly passionate about what they're doing, people who live their lives in a more selfless way than most people. That's when I'm inspired. That's what I aspire to do and be.
The point is that one's got an instinct to live. One doesn't live because one's reason assents to living. People who, as we say, 'would be better dead' don't want to die! People who apparently have everything to live for just let themselves fade out of life because they haven't got the energy to fight.
It can be seen as 'weak' to complain about health issues or worry about your health. But with younger guys, I think it's just a case of it being a secondary thought. We live pretty busy lifestyles these days. People have got work and social lives, and they party and spend a lot of time doing other things, and health just takes a backseat in a lot of cases. That's just the way a lot of people seem to live their lives.
I talked to over two hundred patients and family members about their experiences with aging, serious illnesses, and the big unfixables. But I also spoke with scores of physicians, and especially geriatricians, palliative care doctors, hospice nurses, and nursing home workers. The biggest thing I found was that when these clinicians were at their best, they were recognizing that people had priorities besides merely living longer. The most important and reliable way that we can understand what people's priorities are, besides just living longer, is to simply ask. And we don't ask.
People discover that by helping others, even when they themselves are suffering, they end up improving their own lives.
Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! It's true that many people around you now may think you are weird or even a danger to society, but you don't care. Once you've tasted the truth, you won't ever want to go back to being ignorant
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