Top 200 Atul Gawande Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”

— Atul Gawande

Featured in: Genius Quotes

2. “Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.”

— Atul Gawande

3. “Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.”

— Atul Gawande

4. “You may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.”

— Atul Gawande

5. “And in stories, endings matter.”

— Atul Gawande

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

6. “No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn’t reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.”

— Atul Gawande

7. “Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”

— Atul Gawande

8. “We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right – one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.”

— Atul Gawande

9. “Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you’ve got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.”

— Atul Gawande

10. “The evidence is that people who enter hospice don’t have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.”

— Atul Gawande

11. “I see it now – this world is swiftly passing. – the warrior Karna, in the Mahabharata.”

— Atul Gawande

12. “This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.”

— Atul Gawande

13. “I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.”

— Atul Gawande

14. “No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.”

— Atul Gawande

15. “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being.”

— Atul Gawande

16. “Culture has tremendous inertia,” he said. “That’s why it’s culture. It works because it lasts. Culture strangles innovation in the crib.”

— Atul Gawande

17. “I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them.”

— Atul Gawande

18. “Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.”

— Atul Gawande

19. “Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.”

— Atul Gawande

20. “Endings matter, not just for the person but, perhaps even more, for the ones left behind.”

— Atul Gawande

21. “My third answer for becoming a positive deviant: Count something. Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine – or outside medicine, for that matter – one should be a scientist in the world... If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting.”

— Atul Gawande

22. “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

— Atul Gawande

23. “Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.”

— Atul Gawande

24. “Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work – whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty – is the great task of our generation as a whole.”

— Atul Gawande

25. “Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.”

— Atul Gawande

26. “Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.”

— Atul Gawande

27. “Medicine’s ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom – for both patients and doctors – is defined by how one copes with it. This.”

— Atul Gawande

28. “You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.”

— Atul Gawande

29. “It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death – losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, “Old age is a continuous series of losses.” Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

— Atul Gawande

30. “Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.”

— Atul Gawande

31. “Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.”

— Atul Gawande

32. “Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations.”

— Atul Gawande

33. “This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.”

— Atul Gawande

34. “Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We.”

— Atul Gawande

35. “You can’t make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that’s prepared for the unexpected.”

— Atul Gawande

36. “A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue.”

— Atul Gawande

37. “The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.”

— Atul Gawande

38. “In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.”

— Atul Gawande

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

39. “All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.”

— Atul Gawande

40. “The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives – and they lived 25 percent longer.”

— Atul Gawande

41. “Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy – the freedom – to be the authors of our lives.”

— Atul Gawande

42. “A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

— Atul Gawande

43. “The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people’s lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.”

— Atul Gawande

44. “In one study, old people assigned to a geriatrics team stayed independent for far longer, and were admitted to the hospital less.”

— Atul Gawande

45. “The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society.”

— Atul Gawande

46. “Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine – an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets – can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.”

— Atul Gawande

47. “When we lived in a society where we had large families that lived together, especially in agricultural societies like my grandfather and father grew up in, the result is you always had family around to take care of you.”

— Atul Gawande

48. “Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.”

— Atul Gawande

49. “Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.”

— Atul Gawande

50. “I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.”

— Atul Gawande