Top 200 Atul Gawande Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw was: better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes willingness to try.”

— Atul Gawande

102. “When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrician’s uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not.”

— Atul Gawande

103. “Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them.”

— Atul Gawande

104. “The problem is that the wise course is so frequently unclear. For a long while, I thought that this was simply because of uncertainty. When it is hard to know what will happen, it is hard to know what to do. But the challenge, I’ve come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most.”

— Atul Gawande

105. “One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most.”

— Atul Gawande

106. “And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?”

— Atul Gawande

107. “To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation – head down, trying not to screw up, just going from one day to the next – that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and offering you a job. But the day comes.”

— Atul Gawande

108. “No, the more familiar and widely dangerous issue is a kind of silent disengagement, the consequence of specialized technicians sticking narrowly to their domains. “That’s not my problem” is possibly the worst thing people can think, whether they are starting an operation, taxiing an airplane full of passengers down a runway, or building a thousand-foot-tall skyscraper.”

— Atul Gawande

109. “People who reach certain levels of frailty, more important than getting their mammogram, more important than getting their blood pressure tweaked, they’re at high risk of falling. If they fall and break their hip, they not only die sooner, they die miserably.”

— Atul Gawande

110. “The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.”

— Atul Gawande

111. “The anthropologist Lawrence Cohen describes conferences and conventions not so much as scholarly goings-on but as carnivals – “colossal events where academic proceedings are overshadowed by professional politics, ritual enactments of disciplinary boundaries, sexual liminality, tourism and trade, personal and national rivalries, the care and feeding of professional kinship, and the sheer enormity of discourse.”

— Atul Gawande

112. “We want perfection without practice. Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the future.”

— Atul Gawande

113. “Our reverence for independence takes no account of the reality of what happens in life: sooner or later, independence will become impossible. Serious illness or infirmity will strike. It is as inevitable as sunset. And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?”

— Atul Gawande

114. “The power of checklists is limited, Boorman emphasized. They can help experts remember how to manage a complex process or configure a complex machine. They can make priorities clearer and prompt people to function better as a team. By themselves, however, checklists cannot make anyone follow them. I.”

— Atul Gawande

115. “Spending one’s final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said good-bye or “It’s okay” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”

— Atul Gawande

116. “Each year, about 350,000 Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, 40 percent end up in a nursing home, and 20 percent are never able to walk again.”

— Atul Gawande

117. “He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy – 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

118. “As you get older, the lordosis of your spine tips your head forward,” he said to me. “So when you look straight ahead it’s like looking up at the ceiling for anyone else. Try to swallow while looking up: you’ll choke once in a while. The problem is common in the elderly. Listen.” I realized that I could hear someone in the dining room choking on his food every minute or so.”

— Atul Gawande

119. “People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete.”

— Atul Gawande

120. “Block has a list of questions that she aims to cover with sick patients in the time before decisions have to be made: What do they understand their prognosis to be, what are their concerns about what lies ahead, what kinds of trade-offs are they willing to make, how do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can’t? A decade.”

— Atul Gawande

121. “Taking care of a debilitated, elderly person in our medicalized era is an overwhelming combination of the technological and the custodial.”

— Atul Gawande

122. “Instead they choose to accept their fallibilities. They recognised the simplicity and power of using a checklist.”

— Atul Gawande

123. “We are besieged by simple problems... Checklists can provide protection.”

— Atul Gawande

124. “Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy – 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

125. “International organizations are fond of grand-sounding pledges to rid the planet of this or that menace. They nearly always fail, however. The world is too vast and too various to submit to dictates from on high.”

— Atul Gawande

126. “We witnessed for ourselves the consequences of living for the best possible day today instead of sacrificing time now for time later.”

— Atul Gawande

127. “The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all.”

— Atul Gawande

128. “What is troubling is not just being average but settling for it. Everyone knows that average-ness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters – looks, money, tennis – we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child’s pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average.”

— Atul Gawande

129. “Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.”

— Atul Gawande

130. “Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self – which is absorbed in the moment – your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole.”

— Atul Gawande

131. “The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not.”

— Atul Gawande

132. “Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. And in stories, endings matter.”

— Atul Gawande

133. “As a person’s end draws near, there comes a moment when responsibility shifts to someone else to decide what to do.”

— Atul Gawande

134. “This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals – from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families’ hands to coping with poverty among the elderly – but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we’re weak and frail and can’t fend for ourselves anymore.”

— Atul Gawande

135. “When, as the researchers put it, “life’s fragility is primed,” people’s goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely. It’s perspective, not age, that matters most. Tolstoy.”

— Atul Gawande

136. “Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins.”

— Atul Gawande

137. “If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.”

— Atul Gawande

138. “Do what is right, and do it now.”

— Atul Gawande

139. “Western medicine is dominated by a single imperative – the quest for machinelike perfection in the delivery of care.”

— Atul Gawande

140. “We are all plagued by failures – by missed subtleties, overlooked knowledge, and outright errors. For the most part, we have imagined that little can be done beyond working harder and harder to catch the problems clean up after them. We are not in the habit of thinking the way the army pilots did as they looked upon their shiny new Model 299 bomber – a machine so complex no one was sure human beings could try it.”

— Atul Gawande

141. “If the conversation people think is coming is the ‘death panel’ conversation, that’s a total failure.”

— Atul Gawande

142. “At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality- the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage – the courage to act on the truth we find.”

— Atul Gawande

143. “A year on, Eleanor remained haunted by what happened to her. She still had no idea where the bacteria came from. Perhaps the foot soak and pedicure she had gotten at a small hair-and-nail shop the day before that wedding.”

— Atul Gawande

144. “Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers. I wrote this book in.”

— Atul Gawande

145. “Yet – and this is the painful paradox – we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.”

— Atul Gawande

146. “A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.”

— Atul Gawande

147. “People die only once. They have no experience to draw on.”

— Atul Gawande

148. “Even worse than losing self-confidence, though, is reacting defensively. There are surgeons who will see faults everywhere except in themselves. They have no questions and no fears about their abilities. As a result, they learn nothing from their mistakes and know nothing of their limitations. As one surgeon told me, it is a rare but alarming thing to meet a surgeon without fear. “If you’re not a little afraid when you operate,” he said, “you’re bound to do a patient a grave disservice.”

— Atul Gawande

149. “Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”

— Atul Gawande

150. “If there is a credo in practical medicine, it is that the important thing is to be sensible.”

— Atul Gawande