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Acceptance
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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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Ambition
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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
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Apathy
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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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Doctors
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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.
-William Osler
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The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
-William Osler
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
-William Osler
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Instinct
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The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
-William Osler
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Laughter
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There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter -- loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man. Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
-William Osler
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There is a form that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter-loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and is totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the artless heart of child or man, without egoism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
-William Osler
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Learning
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What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
-William Osler
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Life
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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.
-William Osler
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We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.
-William Osler
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Medicine
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Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
-William Osler
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The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
-William Osler
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The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.
-William Osler
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Failure to examine the throat is a glaring sin of omission, especially in children. One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician.
-William Osler
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Mistakes
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As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.
-William Osler
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Observation
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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.
-William Osler, Aphorisms from His Bedside Teachings and Writings
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Patriotism
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Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic, to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood.
-William Osler, Chauvinism in Medicine Address given to the Canadian Medical Association, Montreal, Canada. Reprinted in Aequanimitas, with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses, and Practitioners of Medicine. Birmingham, AL: Classics of Medicine Library; 1987, September 17, 1902
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Persistence
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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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Planning
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When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.
-William Osler
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Retirement
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Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
-William Osler
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Science
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In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
-William Osler
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Senses
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Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.
-William Osler
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Speeches (oratory)
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Look wise say nothing and grunt, speech was given to conceal thought.
-William Osler
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Books by and about William Osler