Top 100 Siddhartha's Quotes
#1. Siddhartha's priority was to get down to the root of the problem. Buddhism is not culturally bound. Its benefits are not limited to any particular society and have no place in government and politics. Siddhartha
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
#2. The father touched Siddhartha's shoulder. 'You will go into the forest,' he said, 'and become a Samana. If you find bliss in the forest, come back and teach it to me. If you find disillusionment, come back, and we shall again offer sacrifices to the gods together. Now go..
Hermann Hesse
#3. Zarathustra received his revelations from the archangels at age thirty, when he began his prophetic mission; Siddhartha's great renunciation of his princely life took place in his thirtieth year. Thoreau at age thirty finished his self-imposed isolation at Walden Pond.
Kevin Dann
#4. A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering -
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#5. Indeed, cancer's emergence in the world is the product of a double negative: it becomes common only when all other killers themselves have been killed.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#6. Lung cancer incidence in men increased dramatically in the 1950s as a result of an increase in cigarette smoking during the early twentieth century. In women, a cohort that began to smoke in the 1950s, lung cancer incidence has yet to reach its peak.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#7. The very effect of X-rays killing rapidly dividing cells - DNA damage - also created cancer-causing mutations in genes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#8. And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#9. Every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that is genetically different from its parents. When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#11. A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#12. Is there something I can do to kill the cancer germ? Can the rooms be fumigated ... ? Should I give up my lease and move out?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#13. Siddhartha considered his circumstances. Thinking did not come easily to him. He didn't really feel like it, but he forced himself.
Hermann Hesse
#14. This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#15. A Pap smear would give a woman a chance to receive preventive care [and] greatly decrease the likelihood of her ever developing cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#16. Unlike other diseases, the vulnerability to cancer lies in ourselves. We always thought of disease as exogenous, but research into cancer has turned that idea on its head - as long as we live, grow, age, there will be cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#17. I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#18. Low fiber, red meat rich diets increase the risks of colon cancer, and obesity is linked to breast cancer, but much more about these links remain unknown, especially in molecular terms.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#19. We know cancer is caused ultimately via a link between the environment and genes. There are genes inside cells that tell cells to grow and the same genes tell cells to stop growing. When you deregulate these genes, you unleash cancer. Now, what disrupts these genes? Mutations.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#20. Truly, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts as this I, this riddle, the fact I am alive, that I am separated and isolated from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And about nothing in the world do I know less about than me, about Siddhartha!
Hermann Hesse
#21. But of all the water's secrets, he saw today only a single one-one that struck his soul. He saw that this water flowed and flowed, it was constantly flowing, and yet it was always there; it was always eternally the same and yet new at every moment! Oh, to be able to grasp this, to understand this!
Hermann Hesse
#22. One day, I had a patient who was going through chemotherapy who came to me and said, 'I'm going to go on with what I'm doing, but I need you to tell me what it is that I'm fighting.'
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#23. In China, lung cancer is already a leading cause of death attributable to smoking in men.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#24. The discipline of medicine concerns the manipulation of knowledge under uncertainty.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#25. Each of us knows a few or several young people whose lives have been devastated by cancer. I don't mean to be nihilistic about it, but it is very much an active killer of people now.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#26. The chances in some cases are infinitesimal, but the potential is still there. This is about all that patients need to know and it is about all that patients want to know.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#27. There's a rising cancer trend and, as I said, one of the major contributors is the overall ageing of the population - we aren't dying of other things, so we're dying of cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#28. Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers," the study's authors wrote. "In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual's need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#29. Over a man's life, his semen grew into a mobile library of every part of the body - a condensed distillate of the self. This
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#30. Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#31. Could your medicine be a cell, not a pill? Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body? Could your medicine be an environment?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#32. There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#33. This isolation was key to Farber's early success. Insulated from the spotlights of public scrutiny, he worked on a small, obscure piece of the puzzle. Leukemia was an orphan disease, abandoned by internists, who had no drugs to offer for it, and by surgeons, who could not possibly operate on blood.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#34. Cancer has enormous diversity and behaves differently: it's highly mutable, the evolutionary principles are very complicated and often its capacity to be constantly mystifying comes as a big challenge.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#35. When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#36. I had a novice's hunger for history, but also a novice's inability to envision it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#37. What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they're medically ill. It's also a moment of hope and expectation and concern.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#38. It's easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you to make perfect decisions with imperfect information.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#39. In New York in the 1910s, William B. Coley, James Ewing, and Ernest Codman had treated bone sarcomas with a mixture of bacterial toxins - the so-called Coley's toxin.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#40. Some cancers are curable, while others are highly incurable. The spectrum is enormous. Metastatic pancreatic cancer is a highly incurable disease, whereas some leukemia forms are very curable. There is a big difference between one form and another.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#41. The God of Worms had evidently left tiny loopholes of chance in the worm's design, but He still wouldn't throw dice.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#42. What if - poring through Graham's bank in some future era - the selected "genius specimens" were found to possess the very genes that, in alternative situations, might be identified as disease enabling (or vice versa: What if "disease-causing" gene variants were also genius enabling?)?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#43. Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#44. Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.
Hermann Hesse
#45. If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#46. It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. - Sun Tzu
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#47. The revolution in cancer research can be summed up in a single sentence: cancer is, in essence, a genetic disease. - Bert Vogelstein
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#48. Every living thing is sacred to me. Compassion and love can heal this world, which is set on fire of violence and hatred. I will teach the world about compassion, and end the suffering by halting these floods of sorrow. Said Prince Siddhartha and began his journey of saving the man kind." ,
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
#49. This book is the story of the birth, growth, and future of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science:
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#50. Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#53. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. This is our predicament with cancer: we are forced to keep running merely to keep still.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#55. BRCA-1, a gene that strongly predisposes humans to breast and ovarian cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#56. There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#57. An Irish surgeon, Denis Burkitt, discovered an aggressive form of lymphoma - now called Burkitt's lymphoma -
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#58. For you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than force. Vesadeva to Siddartha
Hermann Hesse
#59. What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#60. Cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside and beyond itself; it subsumes all living.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#61. I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#62. Then Siddhartha began to understand that his son had not brought him happiness and peace, but suffering and worry. But he loved him, and he preferred the suffering and worries of love over happiness and joy without the boy.
Hermann Hesse
#63. It was a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein; that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built).
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#64. We may have to learn to live with cancer rather than die of it. It means a big change in our mindset and how we do research. We haven't quite reached there yet.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#65. When words are both true and kind, they can change the world.
Gautama Buddha
#66. He whispered in the king's ear, "If you ask me, I think you should find a wife for Siddhartha. Once he has a family to occupy him, he will abandon this desire to become a monk." King Suddhodana nodded.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#67. It is one thing to try to understand how genes influence human identity or sexuality or temperament. It is quite another thing to imagine altering identity or sexuality or behavior by altering genes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#68. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#69. The gene that enables birds to learn songs can become cancer-causing. There is no normal physiological process that can't be bastardized by the disease.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#70. In 2004, a rash of early scientific reports suggested that cell phones, which produce radio frequency energy, might cause a fatal form of brain cancer called a glioma.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#71. Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#72. The dinosaurs who studied dinosaurs would soon become extinct in their own right. Watson
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#73. The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#74. Second, proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes typically lie at the hubs of cellular signaling pathways.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#75. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#76. Gliomas appeared on the same side of the brain that the phone was predominantly held, further tightening the link. An avalanche of panic ensued in the media.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#77. And so Gotama wandered into the town to obtain alms, and the two Samanas recognized him only by his complete peacefulness of demeanor, by the stillness of his form, in which there was no seeking, no will, no counterfeit, no effort - only light and peace.
Hermann Hesse
#78. Most of the selected essays share a common thread: They describe how science happens.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#80. The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#81. It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#82. I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
Hermann Hesse
#83. It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#84. It is not what you have," as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, "it is what you do with it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#85. Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#86. Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#87. Bodh Gaya is a land of enlightenment. Years ago, what Bodh Gaya got was Siddhartha but what Bodh Gaya gave to the world was Lord Buddha, the epitome of knowledge, peace and compassion.
Narendra Modi
#88. Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#89. Being born a princess is all right, but behaving like one can be dangerous.
Siddhartha Choudhary
#90. Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#91. Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.
Gautama Buddha
#92. The search for a way to eradicate this scourge ... is left to incidental dabbling and uncoordinated research. - The Washington Post, 1946
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#93. Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself? - John Sulston Scholars
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#94. In the late 1940s, Saunders had tended to a Jewish refugee from Warsaw dying of cancer in London. The man had left Saunders his life savings - £500 - with a desire to be "a window in [her] home."577
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#95. Leukemia is cancer of the white blood cells - cancer in one of its most explosive, violent incarnations. As one nurse on the wards often liked to remind her patients, with this disease even a paper cut is an emergency.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#96. Seeking nothing, emulating nothing, breathing gently, he moved in an atmosphere of imperishable calm, impresihable light, inviolable peace.
Hermann Hesse
#97. Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics - a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#98. Cancer changes your life," a patient wrote after her mastectomy. "It alters your habits. ... Everything becomes magnified.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#99. It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
