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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.

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
Body
Medicine
Variability
Life
Disease
Diseased
Conditions
Abnormal
Health
React
Law
Alike
Faces
Behave
Individual
Bodies
Two
Individuals

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Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.
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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.
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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.
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Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.
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The great majority gave no signs one way or the other like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.
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Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.
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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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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 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.
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A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.
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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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The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.
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If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.
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Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem.
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The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.
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The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
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What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
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Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
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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.
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To it, more than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had - to this power of settling down to the day's work and trying to do it to the best of one's ability, and letting the future take care of itself.
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