Quote

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.

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
Fighting
Lack
Bred
Whatever
Integrity
Foe
Character
Cause
Apathy
Self
Fight
Contempt
Dangerous
Indifference
Virtue
Pursuit
Carelessness
Causes
Satisfaction
Pursuits
Knowledge
Honesty
Absorption

More quotes by William Osler

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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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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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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.
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Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.
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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.
William Osler
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There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.
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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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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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.
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Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
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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 you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.
William Osler
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In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.
William Osler
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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.
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 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.
William Osler
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The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.
William Osler
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The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
William Osler
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The good physician treats the disease the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
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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Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
William Osler