What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
—William Osler
Topics: Learning
We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.
—William Osler
Topics: Life and Living
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
—William Osler
To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
—William Osler
Topics: Decisions, Procrastination, Inaction, Getting Going
The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
—William Osler
Topics: Vision, Secrets of Success, Success
Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith-the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible.
—William Osler
Topics: Faith
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
—William Osler
The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today’s work superbly well.
—William Osler
Topics: Work, Future, Work Ethics, Excellence, Planning, Preparation
Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.
—William Osler
Topics: Acceptance, Complaining
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
—William Osler
Topics: Ignorance
The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.
—William Osler
Topics: Day
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents. Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential…
—William Osler
Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or co-mmission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.
—William Osler
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.
—William Osler
Topics: Observation
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals—this alone is worth the struggle.
—William Osler
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
—William Osler
Topics: Teaching
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
—William Osler
Topics: Ambition
Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
—William Osler
Topics: Age, Aging, Retirement
The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.
—William Osler
Topics: Medicine
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.
—William Osler
Topics: Truth
We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.
—William Osler
Topics: Eating
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
—William Osler
Topics: Medicine
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease
—William Osler
Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
—William Osler
Topics: Satisfaction
Best possible way to prepare for tomorrow
is to concentrate all your intelligence,
on doing’s today’s work superbly today.
—William Osler
We are here not to get all we can out of life for ourselves, but to try to make the lives of others happier.
—William Osler
Topics: Happiness
Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.
—William Osler
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.
—William Osler
Topics: Laughter
A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
—William Osler
The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest….
—William Osler
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Frederick Banting Canadian Medical Scientist
- Wilfred Grenfell Canadian Humanitarian
- Erastus Wiman Canadian Journalist
- Thomas Chandler Haliburton Canadian Author, Jurist
- Lucy Maud Montgomery Canadian Novelist, Children’s Writer
- Deepak Chopra Indian-born American Physician
- Edward de Bono British Psychologist, Writer
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. American Physician, Essayist
- Julien Offray de La Mettrie French Physician
- Viktor Frankl Austrian Psychiatrist
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