Sir William Osler (1849–1919) was a Canadian physician hailed as a founding father of modern medicine. He revolutionized medical education by integrating clinical experience into the learning process, advocating for the practice of bedside teaching. Osler believed that direct observation and care of patients were paramount for medical students, a stark departure from the predominant lecture-based teaching methods of his time. As one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital, he established the first residency program, setting a global standard for postgraduate medical training. Osler’s contributions extended beyond education; he was also a prolific writer, best known for his seminal textbook, “The Principles and Practice of Medicine,” which remained a key reference for decades. His approach to medicine was characterized by a deep compassion for his patients, emphasizing the importance of the human element in healthcare. Osler’s legacy endures through his profound impact on the ethos of medical education and practice.

William Osler Quotes

1. “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”
— William Osler

2. “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

3. “He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.”
— William Osler

4. “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.”
— William Osler

5. “Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”
— William Osler

6. “If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.”
— William Osler

7. “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.”
— William Osler

8. “The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.”
— William Osler

9. “The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.”
— William Osler

10. “He who knows syphilis knows medicine.”
— William Osler

11. “No man is really happy or safe without a hobby…”
— William Osler

12. “We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.”
— William Osler

13. “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!”
— William Osler

14. “What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.”
— William Osler

15. “Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.”
— William Osler

16. “Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.”
— William Osler

17. “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.”
— William Osler

18. “There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.”
— William Osler

19. “The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.”
— William Osler

20. “It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.”
— William Osler

21. “To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle.”
— William Osler

22. “Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.”
— William Osler

23. “The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.”
— William Osler

24. “Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we have taught you is in error, and furthermore we cannot tell you which half it is.”
— William Osler

25. “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”
— William Osler

26. “The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.”
— William Osler

27. “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

28. “The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.”
— William Osler

29. “The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.”
— William Osler

30. “The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.”
— William Osler

31. “Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day.”
— William Osler

32. “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.”
— William Osler

33. “There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.”
— William Osler

34. “The most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship.”
— William Osler

35. “It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.”
— William Osler

36. “Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.”
— William Osler

37. “To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.”
— William Osler

38. “A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.”
— William Osler

39. “The very first step toward success in any occupation is to become interested in it. Locke put this in a very happy way when he said, give a pupil “a relish of knowledge” and you put life into his work.”
— William Osler

40. “Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.”
— William Osler

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.”
— William Osler

45. “Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.”
— William Osler

46. “Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.”
— William Osler

47. “Laughter is the music of life.”
— William Osler

48. “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

49. “No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.”
— William Osler

50. “Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.”
— William Osler

51. “There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.”
— William Osler

52. “The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.”
— William Osler

53. “A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.”
— William Osler

54. “The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.”
— William Osler

55. “Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.”
— William Osler

56. “I desire no other epitaph – no hurry about it, I may say – than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do.”
— William Osler

57. “Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise – the quadrangle of health.”
— William Osler

58. “The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles…”
— William Osler

59. “The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.”
— William Osler

60. “To do today’s work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment.”
— William Osler

61. “In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.”
— William Osler

62. “No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.”
— William Osler

63. “To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.”
— William Osler

64. “Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise…”
— William Osler

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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.”
— William Osler

69. “Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.”
— William Osler

70. “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

71. “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

72. “There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.”
— William Osler

73. “Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.”
— William Osler

74. “Imperturbability means coolness and presence of mind under all circumstances, calmness amid storm, clearness of judgment in moments of grave peril, immobility, impassiveness, or, to use an old and expressive word, phlegm.”
— William Osler

75. “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

76. “Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.”
— William Osler

77. “The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.”
— William Osler

78. “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.”
— William Osler

79. “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

80. “Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.”
— William Osler

81. “In the first place, in the physician or surgeon no quality takes rank with imperturbability, and I propose for a few minutes to direct your attention to this essential bodily virtue.”
— William Osler

82. “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.”
— William Osler

83. “A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.”
— William Osler

84. “One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell.”
— William Osler

85. “Avoid wine and women – choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.”
— William Osler

86. “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

87. “It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep: far from it, they are awake – many of them at any rate – to the importance of the scientific study of disease.”
— William Osler

88. “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.”
— William Osler

89. “Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.”
— William Osler

90. “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

91. “Nothing is life is more wonderful than faith.”
— William Osler

92. “Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.”
— William Osler

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Beware of people who call you ‘Doc.’ They rarely pay their bills.”
— William Osler

96. “We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences.”
— William Osler

97. “We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?”
— William Osler

98. “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

99. “The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.”
— William Osler

100. “A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!”
— William Osler

101. “There is no more potent antidote to the corroding influence of mammon than the presence in the community of a body of men devoted to science, living for investigation and caring nothing for the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.”
— William Osler

102. “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

103. “The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts – head, heart and haggis.”
— William Osler

104. “It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men who do its daily work in general practice.”
— William Osler

105. “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.”
— William Osler

106. “Quit worrying about your health. It’ll go away.”
— William Osler

107. “For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him.”
— William Osler

108. “To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.”
— William Osler

109. “Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.”
— William Osler

110. “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

111. “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.”
— William Osler

112. “Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.”
— William Osler

113. “Fed on the dry husks of facts, the human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.”
— William Osler

114. “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.”
— William Osler

115. “Save the fleeting minute; learn gracefully to dodge the bore.”
— William Osler

116. “What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?”
— William Osler

117. “The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public… Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.”
— William Osler

118. “Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.”
— William Osler

119. “The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.”
— William Osler

120. “When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.”
— William Osler

121. “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.”
— William Osler

122. “Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life – the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs.”
— William Osler

123. “Taking a lady’s hand gives her confidence in her physician.”
— William Osler

124. “That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.”
— William Osler

125. “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

126. “At the outset do not be worried about this big question – Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.”
— William Osler

127. “Perfect happiness for student and teacher will come with the abolition of examinations, which are stumbling blocks and rocks of offense in the pathway of the true student.”
— William Osler