William Osler Quotes (73 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

    The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.

    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.

    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.


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

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

    The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.

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

    The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaint.

    There are only two sorts of doctors those who practice with their brains, and those who practice with their tongues.

    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.

    We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.

    Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature -- subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasurers, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today. . . . The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

    The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

    Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.

    The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

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

    There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.

    The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.


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

    What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?

    There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

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

    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.

    The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.

    The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade a calling, not a business a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish.

    To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

    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.

    The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

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

    Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.

    The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

    The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

    There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.

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

    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.

    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.

    To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

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

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

    Here's the advice Sir William Osler gave the students at Yale 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.

    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.

    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.

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


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