Paul Kalanithi Quotes

The physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face - and make sense of - their own existence.

Paul Kalanithi

• Existence
• Duty
• Patient

Words have a longevity that I do not have.

Paul Kalanithi

• Words
• Longevity

While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons' work is the crucible of identity. Every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves.

Paul Kalanithi

• Brain
• Identity
• Neurosurgeon

Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling.

Paul Kalanithi

• Job
• Lifestyle
• Calling

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

Paul Kalanithi

• Hope
• Science
• Fear

A resident's surgical skill is judged by their technique and speed. You can't be sloppy, and you can't be slow.

Paul Kalanithi

• Speed
• Technique
• Skill

When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.

Paul Kalanithi

• Words
• Tool
• Scalpels

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete.

Paul Kalanithi

• World
• Knowledge
• Relationship

The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient's eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon's diagnosis.

Paul Kalanithi

• Patient
• Disaster
• Diagnosis

We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units.

Paul Kalanithi

• World
• Manipulate
• Theories