William Osler Quotes

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.

The future is today.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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

In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The incessant concentration of thought upon one subject, however interesting, tethers a man's mind in a narrow field.

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

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

He who knows syphilis knows medicine

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 greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.

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.

We may indeed be justly proud of our apostolic succesion. THESE ARE OUR METHODS - to carefully observe the phenomena of life in all its stages , to cultivate reasoning faculty so as to be able to know the true from the false. THIS IS OUR WORK - to prevent disease, to relieve suffering and to heal the sick.

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.

Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.

Laughter is the music of life.

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.

To do today's work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment

Save the fleeting minute; learn gracefully to dodge the bore.

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

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

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.

The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.

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

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.

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

To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.

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.

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.

The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.

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.

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.

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

The most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship.

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

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.

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

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

Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.

One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell.

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

When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.

To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.

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 hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.

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.

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

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

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!

Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has

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

What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.

The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head, heart and haggis.

Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.

That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.

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.

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

In the first place, in the physician or surgeon no quality takes rank with imperturbability, and I propose for a few minutes to direct your attention to this essential bodily virtue.

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.

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 treasures, 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 good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

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.

Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.

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

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

Personally, I do not see in Canada it would be a feasible thing if any Ministry organized taking over both the Health and the Disease of the entire community ... even in the most favourable circumstances ... there would be that absence of competition and that sense of independence ... I do not believe it would be good for the profession or good for the Public.

Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise ...

Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.

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.

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

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.

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

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