William Osler

“It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.”

“The future is today.”

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

“What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.”

“The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.”

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

“Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.”

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

“The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.”

“One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”