William Osler

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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