Study until 25, investigate until 40, profession until 60, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy – indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred...

Save the fleeting minute; learn gracefully to dodge the bore.

There are no straight backs, no symmetrical faces, many wry noses, and no even legs. We are a crooked and perverse generation.

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

Here’s the advice Sir William Osler gave the students at Yale: “Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day absorb all your interest, energy and enthusiasm. The best preparation for...

The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of...

The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today’s work superbly well.

Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about...

It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.

Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.

Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and...

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

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.

Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.

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

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 practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work...

There are only two sorts of doctors: those who practice with their brains, and those who practice with their tongues.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease

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...

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

Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith – the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible

The future is today.

The search for static security – in the law and elsewhere – is misguided. The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current...

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.

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

One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician.

When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances fit in with them

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

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

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 higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for...

The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts — head, heart and haggis.

The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

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...

Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.

The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.

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

To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a...

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

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries...

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, “hearts are broken, heads are turned”.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

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

To die daily, after the manner of St. Paul, ensures the resurrection of a new man, who makes each day the epitome of life.

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at “full...