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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Osler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1849
Born: July 12
Died: 1919
Died: December 29
Physician
Professor
Sir William Osler
Sir William
WO
Dangerous
Indifference
Virtue
Pursuit
Carelessness
Causes
Satisfaction
Pursuits
Knowledge
Honesty
Absorption
Fighting
Lack
Bred
Whatever
Integrity
Foe
Character
Cause
Apathy
Self
Fight
Contempt

More quotes by William Osler

Image
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.
William Osler
Image
A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
William Osler
Image
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.
William Osler
Image
Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things the motto of one is Prove all things and hold fast that which is good and of the other Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old.
William Osler
Image
We are all dietetic sinners only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.
William Osler
Image
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.
William Osler
Image
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
Image
Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
William Osler
Image
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
Image
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.
William Osler
Image
To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
William Osler
Image
Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.
William Osler
Image
Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.
William Osler
Image
There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
William Osler
Image
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.
William Osler
Image
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
Image
The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions.
William Osler
Image
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
Image
The great majority gave no signs one way or the other like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.
William Osler
Image
In the Mortality Bills, pneumonia is an easy second, to tuberculosis indeed in many cities the death-rate is now higher and it has become, to use the phrase of Bunyan 'the captain of the men of death.'
William Osler