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If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

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
Individual
Science
Art
Wells
Might
Variability
Well
Individuals
Great
Medicine
Among

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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.
William Osler
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Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.
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Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work.
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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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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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Laughter is the music of life.
William Osler
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To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.
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The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
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Be calm and strong and patient. Meet failure and disappointment with courage. Rise superior to the trials of life, and never give in to hopelessness or despair. In danger, in adversity, cling to your principles and ideals. Aequanimitas!
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The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
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Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours.
William Osler
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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 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.
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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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Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
William Osler
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Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
William Osler
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There are only two sorts of doctors those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
William Osler
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The teacher's life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
William Osler
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What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
William Osler