William Osler - Life Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.

William Osler
My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.

William Osler
Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith— the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible.

William Osler
Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

William Osler
The young physician starts life with twenty drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for twenty diseases.

William Osler
The teacher's life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

William Osler
But whatever you do, take neither yourselves nor your fellow-creatures too seriously. There is tragedy enough in our daily routine, but there is room too for a keen sense of the absurdities and incongruities of life, and in the shifting panorama no one sees better than the doctor the perennial sameness of men's ways.

William Osler
It has been said that 'in patience ye shall win your souls,' and what is this patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life?

William Osler
Engrossed late and soon in professional cares, getting and spending, you may may so lay waste your powers that you may find, too late, with hearts given away, that t here is no place in your habit-stricken souls for those gentler influences which make your life worth living.

William Osler
Let me recall to your minds an incident related of that best of men and wisest of rulers, Antoninus Pius, who, as he lay dying, in his home at Loriam in Etruria, summed up the philosophy of life in the watchword, Aequanimitas. … Natural temperament has much to do with its development, but a clear knowledge of our relation to our fellow-creatures and to the work of life is also indispensable. One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell.

William Osler