Top 200 Atul Gawande Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “When my father met her, he was surprised to learn she lived by herself. He was a urologist, which meant he saw many elderly patients, and it always bothered him to find them living alone. The way he saw it, if they didn’t already have serious needs, they were bound to develop them, and coming from India he felt it was the family’s responsibility to take the aged in, give them company, and look after them.”

— Atul Gawande

152. “Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength. 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. Such courage is difficult enough. We have many reasons to shrink from it. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage – the courage to act on the truth we find.”

— Atul Gawande

153. “Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.”

— Atul Gawande

154. “The risk of a fatal car crash with a driver who’s eighty-five or older is more than three times higher than it is with a teenage driver.”

— Atul Gawande

155. “Whereas today people often understate their age to census takers, studies of past censuses have revealed that they used to overstate it.”

— Atul Gawande

156. “Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future. Understanding.”

— Atul Gawande

157. “We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.”

— Atul Gawande

158. “Our ideas of what our priorities are shift as we come face-to-face with some of the struggles.”

— Atul Gawande

159. “There was a succession of roommates, never chosen with her input and all with cognitive impairments. Some were quiet. One kept her up at night. She felt incarcerated, like she was in prison for being old. The.”

— Atul Gawande

160. “Medicine was just another a tool you could try, no different from a healing ritual or a family remedy and no more effective.”

— Atul Gawande

161. “He also found he made mistakes in handling complexity. A good decision requires looking at so many different features of companies in so many ways that, even without the cocaine brain, he was missing obvious patterns. His mental checklist wasn’t good enough. “I am not Warren,” he said. “I don’t have a 300 IQ.” He needed an approach that could work for someone with an ordinary IQ. So he devised a written checklist.”

— Atul Gawande

162. “In the past, surviving into old age was uncommon, and those who did survive served a special purpose as guardians of tradition, knowledge, and history.”

— Atul Gawande

163. “The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do.”

— Atul Gawande

164. “The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.”

— Atul Gawande

165. “Their attitude seemed to result from incomprehension rather than cruelty, but as Tolstoy would have said, what’s the difference in the end?”

— Atul Gawande

166. “So Pabrai added the following checkpoint to his list: when analysing a company, stop and confirm that you’ve asked yourself whether the revenues might be overstated or understated due to boom or bust conditions.”

— Atul Gawande

167. “You want people to make sure to get the stupid stuff right. Yet you also want to leave room for craft and judgment and the ability to respond to unexpected difficulties that arise along the way.”

— Atul Gawande

168. “I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I’d have as a doctor – and, really, as a human being – would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can. But it’s proved true, whether with a patient like Jewel Douglass, a friend like Peg Bachelder, or someone I loved as much as my father.”

— Atul Gawande

169. “And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.”

— Atul Gawande

170. “This experiment of making mortality a medical experience is just decades old. It is young. And the evidence is it is failing.”

— Atul Gawande

171. “Technological society has forgotten what scholars call the “dying role” and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay.”

— Atul Gawande

172. “You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific – matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded.”

— Atul Gawande

173. “We’re good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees. Give us a disease, and we can do something about it. But give us an elderly woman with high blood pressure, arthritic knees, and various other ailments besides – an elderly woman at risk of losing the life she enjoys – and we hardly know what to do and often only make matters worse.”

— Atul Gawande

174. “New technology also creates new occupations and requires new expertise, which further undermines the value of long experience and seasoned judgment.”

— Atul Gawande

175. “HOW DID WE wind up in a world where the only choices for the very old seem to be either going down with the volcano or yielding all control over our lives?”

— Atul Gawande

176. “In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments – which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.”

— Atul Gawande

177. “In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. A.”

— Atul Gawande

178. “You know, there’s this phase of people’s lives in which they can’t really cope on their own, and we ought to find a way to make it manageable.”

— Atul Gawande

179. “But death is not a subject that his doctors, friends, or family can countenance. That is what causes him his most profound pain.”

— Atul Gawande

180. “We are a species that evolved to survive starvation, not resist abundance.”

— Atul Gawande

181. “The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world.”

— Atul Gawande

182. “We’re always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.”

— Atul Gawande

183. “Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. 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.”

— Atul Gawande

184. “As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently.”

— Atul Gawande

185. “But we have at last entered an era in which an increasing number of them believe their job is not to confine people’s choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.”

— Atul Gawande

186. “I tried not to seem like a kid who’d just been offered a chance to go up to the front of the plane and see the cockpit. Sure, I said. That sounds neat.”

— Atul Gawande

187. “Wilson pointed out angrily that even children are permitted to take more risks than the elderly. They at least get to have swings and jungle gyms.”

— Atul Gawande

188. “What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?”

— Atul Gawande

189. “For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn’t matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.”

— Atul Gawande

190. “Those of us in medicine don’t help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix.”

— Atul Gawande

191. “But even more daunting is the second kind of courage – the courage to act on the truth we find.”

— Atul Gawande

192. “As we medical students saw it, the failure of those around Ivan Ilyich to offer comfort or to acknowledge what is happening to him was a failure of character and culture.”

— Atul Gawande

193. “They ask only to be permitted, insofar as possible, to keep shaping the story of their life in the world – to make choices and sustain connections to others according to their own priorities. In modern society, we have come to assume that debility and dependence rule out such autonomy.”

— Atul Gawande

194. “People may hate being embarrassed and strive not to show it when they are, but embarrassment serves an important good.”

— Atul Gawande

195. “Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice. Many.”

— Atul Gawande

196. “There is, however, a skill to it, a developed body of professional expertise. One may not be able to fix such problems, but one can manage them. And until I visited my hospital’s geriatrics clinic and saw the work that the clinicians there do, I did not fully grasp the nature of the expertise involved, or how important it could be for all of us.”

— Atul Gawande

197. “Much of our work today has entered its own B-17 phase. Substantial parts of what software designers, financial managers, firefighters, police officers, lawyers, and most certainly clinicians do are now too complex for them to carry out reliably from memory alone. Multiple fields, in other words, have become too much airplane for one person to fly. Yet it is far from obvious that something as simple as a checklist could be of substantial help.”

— Atul Gawande

198. “Living is a kind of skill.”

— Atul Gawande

199. “Loyalty, said Royce, “solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such service.”

— Atul Gawande

200. “Courage, Laches responds, “is a certain endurance of the soul.”

— Atul Gawande