1849-1919, Canadian Physician
Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.
Sir William Osler – [Senses]
Look wise say nothing and grunt, speech was given to conceal thought.
Sir William Osler – [Speakers and Speaking]
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
Sir William Osler – [Medicine]
Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
Sir William Osler – [Age and Aging]
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
Sir William Osler – [Medicine]
The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
Sir William Osler – [Doctors]
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
Sir William Osler – [Ignorance]
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
Sir William Osler – [Instinct]
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.
Sir William Osler – [Laughter]
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals — this alone is worth the struggle.
Sir William Osler – [Perseverance]
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.
Sir William Osler – [Life and Living]
We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.
Sir William Osler – [Life and Living]
What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
Sir William Osler – [Students]
When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.
Sir William Osler – [Planning]
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.
Sir William Osler – [Work]