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There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

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
Records
Quite
Language
Difficult
Brief
Art
Plain
Men
Acquire
Observation
Record

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Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
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Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day absorb all your interest, energy and enthusiasm. The best preparation for tomorrow is to live today superbly well.
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Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
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Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise.
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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 life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.
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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.
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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 of self satisfaction.
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Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
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The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.
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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.
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Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
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Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.
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Engrossed late and soon in professional cares, getting and spending, you may may so lay waste your powers that you may find, too late, with hearts given away, that t here is no place in your habit-stricken souls for those gentler influences which make your life worth living.
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Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.
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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.
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Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.
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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.
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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 speed ahead.
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That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.
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Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.
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