William Osler Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

Civilization is but a filmy fringe on the history of man.

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

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
Medicine, unlike law and theology, is a progressive science...

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

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
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
In war the microbe kills more than the bullet.

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

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

William Osler
To investigate the causes of death, to examine carefully the condition of organs, after such changes have gone on in them as to render existence impossible and to apply such Knowledge to the prevention and treatment of disease, is one of the highest objects of the Physician.

William Osler
With reason, science never parts company, but with feeling, emotion, passion, what has she to do? They are not of her; they owe her no allegiance. She may study, analyze, and define, she can never control them, and by no possibility can their ways be justified to her.

William Osler
Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.

William Osler
Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours.

William Osler
Worse still is the "lock and key" laboratory in which suspicion and distrust reign, and everyone is jealous and fearful least the other should know of or find out about his work.

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

William Osler
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
A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!

William Osler