William Harvey

The motion of the heart is systole and diastole.

Medicine without anatomy is guesswork.

The body politic mirrors the body natural.

Discovery requires bold conjecture.

The heart's beat is the rhythm of existence.

Humility before nature's complexity.

The lungs and heart work in unison.

Legacy is in the truths we uncover.

The blood's journey is endless.

Anatomists must be seekers of truth.

Life's essence is circulation.

The scalpel cuts through ignorance.

In the heart lies the seat of vitality.

Nature's laws are immutable in medicine.

The heart is the beginning of life; the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in the world, with all the perfection of its being, it propels the blood, which is the life-giving fluid, through the body.

It is absolutely necessary to conclude that the blood in the animal body is impelled in a circuit, and is in a perpetual motion; and that this is the function which the heart performs by means of its pulse; and that it is the sole and only end of the motion and contraction of the heart.

I have often wondered and even laughed at those who, when they have heard my new views on the circulation of the blood, have immediately begun to argue against them, without having seen or examined anything for themselves.

The blood, therefore, is driven from the right side of the heart into the lungs, and from the lungs into the left side of the heart, and from the left side of the heart into the arteries, and from the arteries into the veins, and from the veins into the right side of the heart.

I have not been ashamed to learn from the meanest of creatures, and to derive information from the dissection of the vilest animals.

The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds.