Paul Kalanithi

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't "feel guilty all the time." Maybe it is more along these lines: "We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time.”

“Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I'd sought.”

“During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely, enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely, Occam's razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.”

“The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing... You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”

“The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement.”

“When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.”

“The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient's eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon's diagnosis.”

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”

“Even if you are perfect the World isn't.”

“Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection”

“I knew medicine only by its absence - specifically, the absence of a father growing up: one who went to work before dawn and returned in the dark to a plate of reheated dinner.”

“Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.”

“mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world”

“Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely.”

“The good news is that I've already outlived two Brontes, Keats, and Stephen Crane. The bad news is that I haven't written anything.”

“Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.”

“[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.”

“The physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face - and make sense of - their own existence.”

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete.”

“Time for me is double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence - and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire.”