William Osler Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.

William Osler
To prevent disease, to relieve suffering and to heal the sick — this is our work.

William Osler
What, after all, is education but a subtle, slowly-affected change, due to the action upon us of the Externals; of the written record of the great minds of all ages, of the beautiful and harmonious surroundings of nature and of art, and of the lives, good or ill, of our fellows — these alone educate us, these alone mould the developing minds.

William Osler
Professional chemists look askance at physiological chemistry, and physiological chemists criticize pretty sharply the work of some clinical chemists, but there can be no doubt of the value to the physicians of a very thorough training in methods and ways of organic chemistry.

William Osler
It must be confessed that the practice of medicine among our fellow creatures is often a testy and choleric business.

William Osler
To it, more than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had - to this power of settling down to the day's work and trying to do it to the best of one's ability, and letting the future take care of itself.

William Osler
A physician who does not use books and journals, who does not need a library, who does not read one or two of the best weeklies and monthlies, soon sinks to the level of the cross-counter prescriber, and not alone in practice, but in those mercenary feelings and habits which characterize a trade...

William Osler
Permanence of residence, good undoubtedly for the pocket, is not always best for wide mental vision in the physician.

William Osler
There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.

William Osler
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
The most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship.

William Osler
Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.

William Osler
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise...

William Osler
Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.

William Osler
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
Errors in judgment must occur in the practice of an Art which consists largely in balancing probabilities.

William Osler
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
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
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
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