William Osler Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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

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

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.

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.

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

We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences

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

Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.

He who knows syphilis knows medicine

We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.

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.

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.

We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.

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.

The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.

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 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.

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.

Nothing is life is more wonderful than faith.

The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.

Laughter is the music of life.

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.