Quotes from William Osler

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.

Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.

Nothing is life is more wonderful than faith.

The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.

To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.

The future is today.

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

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

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

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.

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

One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.

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

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.

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

No man is really happy or safe without a hobby.

Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.

Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.

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.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.