Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Geography is destiny.”

— Abraham Verghese

2. “Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted.”

— Abraham Verghese

3. “A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.”

— Abraham Verghese

4. “Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.”

— Abraham Verghese

5. “Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around, but he carried it off so well.”

— Abraham Verghese

6. “I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.”

— Abraham Verghese

7. “The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.”

— Abraham Verghese

8. “Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est!”

— Abraham Verghese

9. “Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

— Abraham Verghese

10. “I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.”

— Abraham Verghese

11. “Make something beautiful of your life.”

— Abraham Verghese

12. “Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.”

— Abraham Verghese

13. “God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by – by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

— Abraham Verghese

14. “We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.”

— Abraham Verghese

15. “We’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.”

— Abraham Verghese

16. “Being the first born gives you great patience.”

— Abraham Verghese

17. “We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.”

— Abraham Verghese

18. “When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.”

— Abraham Verghese

19. “Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.”

— Abraham Verghese

20. “Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.”

— Abraham Verghese

21. “Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.”

— Abraham Verghese

22. “The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.”

— Abraham Verghese

23. “According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

— Abraham Verghese

24. “Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It’s a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing.”

— Abraham Verghese

25. “That’s the funny thing about America – the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others. I’ve had my share of angels.”

— Abraham Verghese

26. “To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.”

— Abraham Verghese

27. “I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.”

— Abraham Verghese

28. “Now I understood what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.”

— Abraham Verghese

29. “Such precious, precious water, Lord, water from our own well; this water that is our covenant with You, with this soil, with the life You granted us. We are born and baptized in this water, we grow full of pride, we sin, we are broken, we suffer, but with water we are cleansed of our transgressions, we are forgiven, and we are born again, day after day till the end of our days. Her mat takes her weight kindly, eases.”

— Abraham Verghese

30. “And if beauty is in the ephemeral, what about the beautiful things you can’t have? Perhaps that kind of beauty does last forever.”

— Abraham Verghese

31. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”

— Abraham Verghese

32. “You can confide in quiet people. They make way for one’s thoughts.”

— Abraham Verghese

33. “The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.”

— Abraham Verghese

34. “When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.”

— Abraham Verghese

35. “In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.”

— Abraham Verghese

36. “Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”

— Abraham Verghese

37. “This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. What she thought was her life is all maya, all.”

— Abraham Verghese

38. “No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.”

— Abraham Verghese

39. “We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

— Abraham Verghese

40. “The chemachen who comes calling for a subscription one morning is no more than a boy, the growth on his upper lip so sparse that each hair could be named after an apostle.”

— Abraham Verghese

41. “I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.”

— Abraham Verghese

42. “No one but “Jigiby Doctor,” who gave her the miraculous drops, may operate.”

— Abraham Verghese

43. “Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.”

— Abraham Verghese

44. “Don’t Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret. Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read.”

— Abraham Verghese

45. “The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?”

— Abraham Verghese

46. “Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.”

— Abraham Verghese

47. “I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly required.”

— Abraham Verghese

48. “I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn’t change them. That hurt.”

— Abraham Verghese

49. “There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-.”

— Abraham Verghese

50. “He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.”

— Abraham Verghese