William Osler Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.
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The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
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Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.
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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.
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No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.
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Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.
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He who knows syphilis knows medicine
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To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.
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Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.
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Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
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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.
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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.
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A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
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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.
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A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!
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Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.