William Osler
Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem.Collection: Physicians
Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.Collection: Humanity
Laughter is the music of life.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Life
To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.Collection: Inspirational
As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.Collection: Mistake
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.Collection: Motivational
Taking a lady's hand gives her confidence in her physician.Collection: Hands
There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter - loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man. Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.Collection: Life
But whatever you do, take neither yourselves nor your fellow-creatures too seriously. There is tragedy enough in our daily routine, but there is room too for a keen sense of the absurdities and incongruities of life, and in the shifting panorama no one sees better than the doctor the perennial sameness of men’s ways.Collection: Men
No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.Collection: Men
Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours.Collection: Sad
The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.Collection: Grief
Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.Collection: Laughter
Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.Collection: Mother
The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.Collection: Eye
Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.Collection: Time
The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.Collection: Teaching
Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.Collection: Reading
Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Education
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.Collection: Sex
A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!Collection: Wise
Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work.Collection: Practice
When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.Collection: Planning
Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.Collection: Lonely
What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.Collection: Life
Throw away all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well. The travelers on the road to success live in the present, heedless of taking thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your wildest ambition.Collection: Ambition
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Brother
For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him.Collection: Library
The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.Collection: Sleep
It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead.Collection: Men
Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things; the motto of one is "Prove all things and hold fast that which is good" and of the other "Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old."Collection: Different
That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.Collection: Men
Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.Collection: Faith
Personally, I do not see in Canada it would be a feasible thing if any Ministry organized taking over both the Health and the Disease of the entire community... even in the most favourable circumstances... there would be that absence of competition and that sense of independence... I do not believe it would be good for the profession or good for the Public.Collection: Believe
Engrossed late and soon in professional cares, getting and spending, you may may so lay waste your powers that you may find, too late, with hearts given away, that t here is no place in your habit-stricken souls for those gentler influences which make your life worth living.Collection: Life
A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.Collection: Book
The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.Collection: Teaching