William Osler Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

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

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

William Osler
We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, Life.

William Osler
As the practice of medicine is not a business and can never be one the education of the heart - the moral side of the man - must keep pace with the education of the head. Our fellow creatures cannot be dealt with as man deals in corn and coal; "the human heart by which we live" must control our professional relations.

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

William Osler
Every medical student should remember that his end is not to be a chemist, or a physiologist or an anatomist, but to learn how to recognize and treat disease, to become a practical physician.

William Osler
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.

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

William Osler
'Tis no idle challenge which we physicians throw out to the world when we claim that our mission is of the highest and of the noblest kind, not alone in curing disease but in educating the people in the laws of health, and in preventing the spread of plagues and pestilences...

William Osler
Use your five senses. The art of the practice of medicine is to be learned only by experience; 'tis not an inheritance; it... cannot be revealed. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone can you become expert.

William Osler
In war the microbe kills more than the bullet.

William Osler
To wrest from nature the secrets which have perplexed philosophers of all ages, to track to their sources the causes of disease, to correlate the vast stores of knowledge, that they may be quickly available for the prevention and cure of disease — these are our ambitions.

William Osler
History is simply the biography of the mind of man; and our interest in history, and its educational value to us, is directly proportionate to the completeness of our study of the individuals through whom this mind has been manifested.

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

William Osler
Truth has been well called the daughter of Time, and even in anatomy, which is a science in a state of fact, the point of view changes with successive generations.

William Osler
Learn to love the freedom of the student life, only too quickly to pass away; the absence of the coarser cares of after days, the joy in comradeship, the delight in new work, the happiness in knowing that you are making progress. Once only can you enjoy these pleasures.

William Osler
It cannot be denied that we have learned more rapidly how to prevent than how to cure diseases, but with a definite outline of our ignorance we no longer live now in a fool's Paradise, and fondly imagine that in all cases we control the issues of life and death with our pills and potions.

William Osler
If necessary, be cruel; use the knife and the cautery to cure the intumescence and moral necrosis which you will feel in the posterior parietal region, in Gall and Spurzheim's center of self-esteem, where you will find a sore spot after you have made a mistake in diagnosis.

William Osler
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
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.

William Osler
The [medical] student often resembles the poet — he is born, not made.

William Osler
The trained nurse as a factor in life may be regarded from many points of view - philanthropic, social, personal, professional and domestic. To her virtues we have been exceeding kind - tongues have dropped manna in their description. To her faults - well let us be blind...

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

William Osler
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
The physician needs a clear head and a kind heart; his work is arduous and complex, requiring the exercise of the very highest faculties of the mind, while constantly appealing to the emotions and finer feelings.

William Osler
The truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor, the best that the best men accept — with this you must learn to be satisfied, retaining at the same time with due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger portion.

William Osler
Marriage is the natural end of the trained nurse. So truly as a young man married is a young man marred, is a woman unmarried, in a certain sense, a woman undone.

William Osler