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
