Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about William Osler
William Osler Quotes
147 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
In war the microbe kills more than the bullet.
William Osler
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
'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
Source
Report...
Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
William Osler
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.
William Osler
Source
Report...
Man can do a great deal by observation and thinking, but with them alone he cannot unravel the mysteries of Nature. Had it been possible the Greeks would have done it; and could Plato and Aristotle have grasped the value of experiment in the progress of human knowledge, the course of European history might have been very different.
William Osler
Source
Report...
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.
William Osler
Source
Report...
The physician without physiology and chemistry flounders along in an aimless fashion, never able to gain any accurate conception of disease, practising a sort of popgun pharmacy, hitting now the malady and again the patient, he himself not knowing which.
William Osler
Source
Report...
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.
William Osler
Source
Report...
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.
William Osler
Source
Report...
Errors in judgment must occur in the practice of an Art which consists largely in balancing probabilities.
William Osler
Source
Report...
No matter where an unprejudiced search after truth may lead an investigator; if his work is that of an honest scientist it must and will finally turn out to be for the benefit of mankind.
William Osler
Source
Report...
Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.
William Osler
Source
Report...
Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise...
William Osler
Source
Report...
Observation plus thinking has given us the bodies of living creatures in health and disease. There have been two inherent difficulties — to get men to see straight and to get men to think clearly; but in spite of the frailty of the instrument, the method has been one of the most powerful ever placed in the hands of man.
William Osler
Source
Report...
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.
William Osler
Source
Report...
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.
William Osler
Source
Report...
Science is organized knowledge, and knowledge is of things we see. Now the things that are seen are temporal; of the things that are unseen science knows nothing and has at present no means of knowing anything.
William Osler
Source
Report...
It may be well for a physician to have pursuits outside his profession, but it is dangerous to let them become too absorbing.
William Osler
Source
Report...
The greatest art is in the concealment of art, and I may say that we of the medical profession excel in this respect.
William Osler
Source
Report...
A man's life may be said to be a gift of his blood pressure, just as Egypt is a gift of the Nile.
William Osler
Source
Report...
Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.
William Osler
Source
Report...
The most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship.
William Osler
Source
Report...
Keen sensibility is doubtless a virtue of high order, when it does not interfere with steadiness of hand or coolness of nerve; but for the practitioner in his working-day world, a callousness which thinks only of the good to be effected, and goes ahead regardless of smaller considerations, is the preferable quality.
William Osler
Source
Report...
I am firmly convinced that the best book in medicine is the book of Nature, as written large in the bodies of men.
William Osler
Source
Report...
To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.
William Osler
1
2
3
4
5
Quote of the day
Good authors, too, who once knew better words Now only use four-letter words Writing prose — Anything goes.
Cole Porter
William Osler
Creative Commons
Born:
July 12, 1849
Died:
December 29, 1919
(aged 70)
Bio:
Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet was a Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Known for:
The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892)
The quotable Osler
Counsels and ideals
Most used words:
life
medicine
science
man
work
faith
art
human
sense
study
knowledge
truth
twenty
disease
physician
William Osler on Wikipedia
William Osler works on Gutenberg Project
William Osler works on Wikisource
Suggest an edit or a new quote
William Osler Quotes
William Osler Short Quotes
Canadian Physician Quotes
Physician Quotes
19th-century Physician Quotes
Related Author
Harvey Cushing
American Physician
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes