Physician Quotes

The real secret of an unsatisfied life lies too often in an unsurrendered will.

James Hudson Taylor

The safest and most prudent of bets to lay money on is surprise. There is a very high probability that whatever astonishes us in biology today will turn out to be useable, and useful, tomorrow.

Should poor souls fear a shade or night,
Who came sure from a sea of light?
Or since those drops are all sent back
So sure to thee, that none doth lack,
Why should frail flesh doubt any more
That what God takes, He'll not restore?

The thinnest people on the planet are those who eat the most carbohydrates.

Neal D. Barnard

A selective process goes on, whereby systems attract and keep those people whose attributes are such as to make them adapted to life in the system: Systems attract systems-people.

So, the bottom line is: if you want to live well and die well, you first have to find out what is really important to you and stick to it. With that, you can get out there and get yourself a life, a real one.

Gian Domenico Borasio

I have been studying inherited susceptibility of cancer through affected families. The goal is to identify genes that are involved in cancer development.

Frederick Pei Li

Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.

William C. Roberts

I think that the cultivation of the humane letters has the most distinct bearing on the cultivation and appreciation of science. Science is nothing without imagination; and imagination is most readily kept fresh by literature. What little good there is a mere descriptive person, and in the small facts which with painful toil he accumulates. But let these facts be welded together by thought, their bearing traced by imagination, experiments devised by the mind projecting itself in advance of them, and the plodder is likely to become the great discoverer.

Jacob Mendes Da Costa

Two souls and bodies seem as one, supported and floating on some divine stream in Paradise.… This is the real ideal and end of Karezza. You will finally enter into such unity that in your fullest embrace you can hardly tell yourselves apart and can read each other's thoughts. You will feel a physical unity as if her blood flowed in your veins, her flesh were yours. For this is the Soul-Blending Embrace.

John William Lloyd

Freemasonry... has no pretension to assume a place among the religions of the world as a sectarian "system of faith and worship," in the sense in which we distinguish Christianity from Judaism, or Judaism from Mohammedanism. In this meaning of the word we do not and can not speak of the Masonic religion, nor say of a man that he is not a Christian, but a Freemason. Here it is that the opponents of Freemasonry have assumed mistaken ground in confounding the idea of a religious Institution with that of the Christian religion as a peculiar form of worship, and in supposing, because Freemasonry teaches religious truth, that it is offered as a substitute for Christian truth and Christian obligation.

It behooves those who devote themselves to observation to be impressed by this truth (i.e., that many "facts" grow old) and to realize that the best work is only good in relation to its time and that it awaits another, more exact and more complete.

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis

German erudition of his time he held in little esteem. They go to work like galley slaves, was his charge. They do not write on a theme because inspired; but the theme comes first, and with assiduous and laborious study they hope to evolve something brilliant out of it.

God does not care what good you did, but why you did it. He does not grade the fruit but probes the core and tests the root.

Angelus Silesius

I've dispatc'd, my dear madam, this scrap of a letter, To say that Miss — — is very much better. A Regular Doctor no longer she lacks, And therefore I've sent her a couple of Quacks.

The Jewish people, no matter where they are, they become the best in the world.

Hitler would go as white as a sheet and tightly clench his jaws, while his eyes would dilate. Everyone in his entourage would get panicky because these fits were always followed by an order to dismiss or to execute somebody.

We should be very careful to distinguish between our knowledge of phenomena and our interpretations of them.

If an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it.

"The differentiation of the neuroses from organic visceral diseases, Dr. Crohn said, "is one of the difficult problems in clinical medicine. Let him who is proud of his acumen and experience as a physician survey, from year to year, his own record in this respect, and his pride may take, will take, a severe fall. With his eyes wide open to the problem, with much experience with the world, people and moods, and with years of clinical training and knowledge, no one is immune to, at times, mistaking organic diseases for the neuroses, or of falsely interpreting neurotic symptoms in terms of pathological states."

Burrill Bernard Crohn

Sometimes I wonder whether today we take sufficient care to make a thorough physical examination before our patient starts off on the round of the laboratories, which have become so necessary that oftentimes we do not fully appreciate the value of our five senses in estimating the condition of the patient.

William James Mayo

A coroner must be humane, fair and fearless in obtaining the truth. That is why I have put my head above the parapet.

Montague Levine

To find health should be the object of the doctor. Any one can find disease.

Andrew Taylor Still

In the culture I grew up in you did your work and you did not put your arm around it to stop other people from looking—you took the earliest possible opportunity to make knowledge available.

On modern scientific research

Like restless birds, the breath of coming rain
Creeps, lilac-laden, up the village street