William Osler

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

Our business is to cure people, not disease.

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

The start of every medical student should be a course in the morgue.

In the physician or surgeon no quality takes rank with imperturbability.

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

The physician needs a clear head and a kind heart; his work is arduous and complex, requiring the exercise of the very highest faculties of the mind, while constantly appealing to the emotions and finer feelings.

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.

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 art of the practice of medicine is to be learned only by experience; 'tis not an inheritance; it cannot be revealed. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone can you become expert.

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

The true student accepts everything on trust and piles up a load of rubbish; but his mind is at work, and in a few years, the light begins to penetrate, and he sifts the wheat from the chaff.

The secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.

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

To know the normal is the beginning of wisdom.

The practice of medicine is a thinker's art, the practice of surgery a plumber's.

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.

The physician without physiology and chemistry practices a sort of popgun pharmacy, hitting now the malady and again the patient, he himself not knowing which.

The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles...he is a senior student anxious to help his juniors.

The value of a library is not in the number of books, but in their selection.