Top 100 William Osler Quotes
#1. The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
William Osler
#2. That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.
William Osler
#3. Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.
William Osler
#4. 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.
William Osler
#5. One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
William Osler
#6. Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.
William Osler
#7. The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.
William Osler
#8. 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.
William Osler
#9. No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, hearts are broken, heads are turned.
William Osler
#10. When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.
William Osler
#11. Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.
William Osler
#12. Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.
William Osler
#13. It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practice medicine, but is not astonishing how badly he may do it.
William Osler
#14. The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
William Osler
#15. 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
William Osler
#16. The person who takes medicine must recover twice,once from the disease ,and once from the medicine.
William Osler
#17. The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
William Osler
#18. Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.
William Osler
#19. The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.
William Osler
#20. To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.
William Osler
#21. There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
William Osler
#22. 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.
William Osler
#23. Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
William Osler
#24. Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.
William Osler
#25. 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 complaints.
William Osler
#26. The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
William Osler
#27. One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell.
William Osler
#28. Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs.
William Osler
#29. The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.
William Osler
#30. Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.
William Osler
#33. We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences
William Osler
#34. 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.
William Osler
#35. 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.
William Osler
#36. Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.
William Osler
#37. Listen to your patient; he is telling you the diagnosis.
William Osler
#38. Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly, at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day.
William Osler
#39. We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.
William Osler
#40. Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
William Osler
#42. Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.
William Osler
#43. The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.
William Osler
#44. If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
William Osler
#45. The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.
William Osler
#46. Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
William Osler
#47. 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.
William Osler
#48. The very first step toward success in any occupation is to become interested in it. Locke put this in a very happy way when he said, give a pupil "a relish of knowledge" and you put life into his work.
William Osler
#49. Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.
William Osler
#50. 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.
William Osler
#51. To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.
William Osler
#53. 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.
William Osler
#54. The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.
William Osler
#55. Save the fleeting minute; learn gracefully to dodge the bore.
William Osler
#56. 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.
William Osler
#57. 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.
William Osler
#58. The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.
William Osler
#59. The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles ...
William Osler
#60. Beware of people who call you 'Doc.' They rarely pay their bills.
William Osler
#61. 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.
William Osler
#62. There is no more potent antidote to the corroding influence of mammon than the presence in the community of a body of men devoted to science, living for investigation and caring nothing for the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.
William Osler
#63. The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
William Osler
#64. He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all
William Osler
#65. In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
William Osler
#66. 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.
William Osler
#67. 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.
William Osler
#68. We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.
William Osler
#69. The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
William Osler
#70. 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.
William Osler
#71. The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions ...
William Osler
#72. Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has
William Osler
#73. Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.
William Osler
#74. The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.
William Osler
#75. 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.
William Osler
#76. 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.
William Osler
#77. Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.
William Osler
#78. Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
William Osler
#79. A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!
William Osler
#80. To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
William Osler
#81. 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.
William Osler
#82. 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."
William Osler
#83. In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.
William Osler
#84. Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.
William Osler
#85. 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.
William Osler
#86. Imperturbability means coolness and presence of mind under all circumstances, calmness amid storm, clearness of judgment in moments of grave peril, immobility, impassiveness, or, to use an old and expressive word, phlegm.
William Osler
#87. The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
William Osler
#88. No man is really happy or safe without a hobby ...
William Osler
#89. Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.
William Osler
#90. The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head, heart and haggis.
William Osler
#91. There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
William Osler
#92. 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.
William Osler
#93. Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise ...
William Osler
#94. The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.
William Osler
#95. It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
William Osler
#96. Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith - the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible.
William Osler
#97. Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
William Osler
#98. Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.
William Osler
#99. The teacher's life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
William Osler
#100. No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
William Osler
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