William Osler quotes:

In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.

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.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

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.

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

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.

Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.

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.

No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.

The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.

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.

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

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.

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

Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.

Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.

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.

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.

Save the fleeting minute; learn gracefully to dodge the bore.

The future is today.

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.

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

It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead.

The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

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

What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

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

No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

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

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

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

Be calm and strong and patient. Meet failure and disappointment with courage. Rise superior to the trials of life, and never give in to hopelessness or despair. In danger, in adversity, cling to your principles and ideals. Aequanimitas!

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.

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.

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.

The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.

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.

The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

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

Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.

Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.

The practice of medicine will be very much as you make it - to one a worry, a care, a perpetual annoyance; to another, a daily job and a life of as much happiness and usefulness as can well fall to the lot of man, because it is a life of self-sacrifice and of countless opportunities to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those that fall.

The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish.

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.

We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.

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.

To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.

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.

There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter - loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man. Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.

Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.

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.

A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.

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

He who knows syphilis knows medicine

Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.

In the Mortality Bills, pneumonia is an easy second, to tuberculosis; indeed in many cities the death-rate is now higher and it has become, to use the phrase of Bunyan 'the captain of the men of death.'

Avoid wine and women - choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

At the outset do not be worried about this big question-Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst-a thirst that from the soul must arise!-the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all.

Beware of people who call you 'Doc.' They rarely pay their bills.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic, to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood.

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.

Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. . . . Put yourself in his place . . . The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look - these the patient understands.

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."

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.

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

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

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

Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem.

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.

Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we have taught you is in error, and furthermore we cannot tell you which half it is

Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.

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

Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.

I desire no other epitaph - no hurry about it, I may say - than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do.

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep: far from it, they are awake - many of them at any rate - to the importance of the scientific study of disease.

It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.

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.

Laughter is the music of life.

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

Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis,

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day absorb all your interest, energy and enthusiasm. The best preparation for tomorrow is to live today superbly well.

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.

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.

No man is really happy or safe without a hobby ...

Nothing is life is more wonderful than faith.

Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.

Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.

Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.

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

Personally, I do not see in Canada it would be a feasible thing if any Ministry organized taking over both the Health and the Disease of the entire community... even in the most favourable circumstances... there would be that absence of competition and that sense of independence... I do not believe it would be good for the profession or good for the Public.

Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.

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

Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today ... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

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

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

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.

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.

The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.

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