A Quote by William Osler

To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.

William Osler

Quote Topics

About Beat Bush Confess Diagnosis Hypothetical Ignorance Often Than Wiser

Quote Author

William Osler
Canadian - Scientist
July 12, 1849 - December 29, 1919

It is better to confess ignorance than provide it.

Homer Hickam

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

Socrates

Al Gore has endorsed Howard Dean for president. That's pretty fitting, the guy that didn't beat Bush endorsing the guy who won't beat Bush.

David Letterman

'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'

William T. Vollmann

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

Carl Sagan

I wanted no part of losing. Why play if you can't beat the other guys more often than they beat you?

Earl Weaver

A smart mother makes often a better diagnosis than a poor doctor.

August Bier

We rather confess our moral errors, faults, and crimes than our ignorance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The tale is often wiser than the teller.

Susan Fletcher

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers.

Heinrich Hertz

Environmentalists get in the way. They often ask the right questions, but they're chasing the wrong answers - often hypothetical or uneconomic solutions.