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It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.

William Osler

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William Osler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1849
Born: July 12
Died: 1919
Died: December 29
Physician
Professor
Sir William Osler
Sir William
WO
Simpler
Absorb
Easier
Books
Read
Book
Much
Contents

More quotes by William Osler

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Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
William Osler
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Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.
William Osler
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To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.
William Osler
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A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.
William Osler
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The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.
William Osler
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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 compare and control. But see first.
William Osler
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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.
William Osler
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It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.
William Osler
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The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head, heart and haggis.
William Osler
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Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
William Osler
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Throw away all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well. The travelers on the road to success live in the present, heedless of taking thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your wildest ambition.
William Osler
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The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
William Osler
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It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men who do its daily work in general practice.
William Osler
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One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
William Osler
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The very first step toward success in any occupation is to become interested in it. Locke put this in a very happy way when he said, give a pupil a relish of knowledge and you put life into his work.
William Osler
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Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.
William Osler
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But whatever you do, take neither yourselves nor your fellow-creatures too seriously. There is tragedy enough in our daily routine, but there is room too for a keen sense of the absurdities and incongruities of life, and in the shifting panorama no one sees better than the doctor the perennial sameness of men’s ways.
William Osler
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Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
William Osler
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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 treasures, 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.
William Osler
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Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.
William Osler