Best 125 quotes of William Osler on MyQuotes

Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.

Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.

A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.

A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.

A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!

A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.

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.

At the outset do not be worried about this big question-Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. 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. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst-a thirst that from the soul must arise!-the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all.

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

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

Be calm and strong and patient. Meet failure and disappointment with courage. Rise superior to the trials of life, and never give in to hopelessness or despair. In danger, in adversity, cling to your principles and ideals. Aequanimitas!

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

Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic, to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood.

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.

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.

Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. . . . Put yourself in his place . . . The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look - these the patient understands.

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.

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.

Engrossed late and soon in professional cares, getting and spending, you may may so lay waste your powers that you may find, too late, with hearts given away, that t here is no place in your habit-stricken souls for those gentler influences which make your life worth living.

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.

Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.

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

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.

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.

Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we have taught you is in error, and furthermore we cannot tell you which half it is

Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.

Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.

He who knows syphilis knows medicine

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

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

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.

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.

In the Mortality Bills, pneumonia is an easy second, to tuberculosis; indeed in many cities the death-rate is now higher and it has become, to use the phrase of Bunyan 'the captain of the men 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.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.

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.

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.

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.

It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.

Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.

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.

Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day absorb all your interest, energy and enthusiasm. The best preparation for tomorrow is to live today superbly well.

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

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.