William Osler quotes

William Osler was a Canadian physician, educator, and one of the founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. His innovative approach to medical teaching emphasized bedside learning and clinical experience. He is regarded as a major figure in the history of modern medicine. Here are 108 of his quotes:

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals. (William Osler)
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability. View quote
William Osler
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. View quote
William Osler
Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants. View quote
William Osler
The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well. View quote
William Osler
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism. View quote
William Osler
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine. View quote
William Osler
We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life. View quote
William Osler
He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all. View quote
William Osler
When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances fit in with them. View quote
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)
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. View quote
William Osler
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle. View quote
William Osler
Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature -- subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasurers, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today. . . . The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty. View quote
William Osler
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease. View quote
William Osler
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. View quote
William Osler
Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever. View quote
William Osler
There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians. View quote
William Osler
My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age. View quote
William Osler
A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient. View quote
William Osler
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. (William Osler)
Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility. View quote
William Osler
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought. View quote
William Osler
To it, more than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had -- to this power of settling down to the day's work and trying to do it to the best of one's ability, and letting the future take care of itself. View quote
William Osler
Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science. View quote
William Osler