William Osler - Man Quotes

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

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

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

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
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.

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

William Osler
Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.

William Osler
It helps a man immensely to be a bit of a hero-worshipper, and the stories of the lives of the masters of medicine do much to stimulate our ambition and rouse our sympathies.

William Osler
There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.

William Osler
The critical sense and sceptical attitude of the Hippocratic school laid the foundations of modern medicine on broad lines, and we owe to it: first, the emancipation of medicine from the shackles of priestcraft and of caste; secondly, the conception of medicine as an art based on accurate observation, and as a science, an integral part of the science of man and of nature; thirdly, the high moral ideals, expressed in that most "memorable of human documents" (Gomperz), the Hippocratic oath; and fourthly, the conception and realization of medicine as the profession of a cultivated gentleman.

William Osler
A man must have faith in himself to be of any use in the world. There may be very little on which to base it — no matter, but faith in one's powers, in one's mission is essential to success. Confidence once won, the rest follows naturally; and with strong faith in himself a man becomes a local center for its radiation. St. Francis, St. Theresa, Ignatius Loyola, Florence Nightingale, the originator of every cult or sect or profession has possessed this infective faith. And in the ordinary everyday work of the doctor confidence, assurance (in the proper sense of the word) is an asset without which it is very difficult to succeed.

William Osler
That man can interrogate as well as observe nature, was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.

William Osler
One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.

William Osler