William Osler Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

William Osler
Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.

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

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

William Osler
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.

William Osler
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 — the poetry of the commonplace, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

William Osler
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.

William Osler
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.

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

William Osler
While in general use for centuries, one good result of the recent development of mental healing has been to call attention to its great value as a measure to be carefully and scientifically applied in suitable cases. My experience has been that of the unconscious rather than the deliberate faith healer. Phenomenal, even what could be called miraculous, cures are not very uncommon. Like others, I have had cases any one of which, under suitable conditions, could have been worthy of a shrine or made the germ of a pilgrimage.

William Osler
A desire to take medicine is, perhaps, the great feature which distinguishes man from other animals.

William Osler
The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.

William Osler
A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.

William Osler
Viewed through the perspective of memory, an unrecorded observation, the vital details long since lost, easily changes its countenance and sinks obediently into the frame fashioned by the fancy of the moment.

William Osler
If the license to practice meant the completion of his education how sad it would be for the practitioner, how distressing to his patients! More clearly than any other the physician should illustrate the truth of Plato's saying that education is a life-long process.

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

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

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

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
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."

William Osler
The trained nurse is a modern representative, not of the Roman Vestal, but of the female guardian in Plato's republic - a choice selection from the very best women of the community who know the laws of health, and whose sympathies have been deepened by contact with the best and worst of men.

William Osler
Common-sense nerve fibers are seldom medullated before forty — they are never seen even with a microscope before twenty.

William Osler
From Hippocrates to Hunter, the treatment of disease was one long traffic in hypotheses.

William Osler
Beware of words - they are dangerous things. They change color like the chameleon, and they return like a boomerang.

William Osler