Top 200 Atul Gawande Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Effort does matter; diligence and attention to the minutest details can save you.”

— Atul Gawande

202. “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

203. “Human birth... is a solution to an evolutionary problem: how a mammal can walk upright, which requires a small, fixed, bony pelvis, and also possess a large brain, which entails a baby whose head is too big to fit through that small pelvis... in a sense, all human mothers give birth prematurely. Other mammals are born mature enough to walk and seek food within hours; our newborns are small and helpless for months.”

— Atul Gawande

204. “Well, if I’m able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV, then I’m willing to stay alive.”

— Atul Gawande

205. “Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot.”

— Atul Gawande

206. “You have a cough that won’t go away – and then? It’s not science you call upon but a doctor. A doctor with good days and bad days. A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he’s still trying to learn.”

— Atul Gawande

207. “Doctors with high confidence in a judgment they made proved no more accurate than doctors with low confidence.”

— Atul Gawande

208. “The side effects are not life-threatening, but they are not trivial. The.”

— Atul Gawande

209. “With repetition, a lot of mental functioning becomes automatic and effortless, as when you drive a car to work. Novel situations, however, usually require conscious thought and “workaround” solutions, which are slower to develop, more difficult to execute, and more prone to error.”

— Atul Gawande

210. “Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany.”

— Atul Gawande

211. “Medicine requires the fortitude to take what comes: your schedule may be packed, the hour late, your child waiting for you to pick him up after swimming practice; but if a problem arises you have to do what is necessary.”

— Atul Gawande

212. “We tend to give some variables too much weight and wrongly ignore others.”

— Atul Gawande

213. “Little more than a decade ago, doctors made the decisions; patients did what they were told.”

— Atul Gawande

214. “Whenever the elderly have had the financial means, they have chosen what social scientists have called “intimacy at a distance.” Whereas in early-twentieth-century America 60 percent of those over age sixty-five resided with a child, by the 1960s the proportion had dropped to 25 percent. By 1975 it was below 15 percent. The pattern is a worldwide one.”

— Atul Gawande

215. “So the night before the operation he did an unusual thing: he discussed the treatment options with her and let her choose.”

— Atul Gawande

216. “When someone has come to you for your expertise and your expertise has failed, what do you have left? You have only your character to fall back upon – and sometimes it’s only your pride that comes through.”

— Atul Gawande

217. “Yet although the odds were against me, it wasn’t as if I had no chance of succeeding.”

— Atul Gawande

218. “Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater, as well.”

— Atul Gawande

219. “Surgery itself is a kind of autopsy. “Autopsy” literally means “to see for oneself,” and, despite our knowledge and technology, when we look we’re often unprepared for what we find.”

— Atul Gawande

220. “It may seem harsh to say, but if it was a sixty-year-old man I would’ve taken the leg without question.” This was partly, I think, a purely emotional unwillingness to cut off the limb of a pretty twenty-three-year-old – the kind of sentimentalism that can get you in trouble.”

— Atul Gawande

221. “In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments – which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep.”

— Atul Gawande

222. “Even good doctors can go bad, and when they do, colleagues tend to be almost entirely unequipped to do anything about them.”

— Atul Gawande

223. “A resident has a distinctive vantage on medicine. You are an insider, seeing everything and a part of everything; yet at the same time you see it anew.”

— Atul Gawande

224. “They believe in practice, not talent.”

— Atul Gawande

225. “Medical care is about our life and death, and we’ve always needed doctors to help us understand what is happening and why, and what is possible and what is not. In the increasingly tangled web of experts and expert systems, a doctor has an even greater obligation to serve as a knowledgeable guide and.”

— Atul Gawande

226. “They belong to the connected and the knowledgeable, to insiders over outsiders, to the doctor’s child but not the truck driver’s. If choice cannot go to everyone, maybe it is better when it is not allowed at all.”

— Atul Gawande

227. “Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business.”

— Atul Gawande

228. “We stop the healthy from committing suicide because we recognize that their psychic suffering is often temporary. We believe that, with help, the remembering self will later see matters differently than the experiencing self – and indeed only a minority of people saved from suicide make a repeated attempt; the vast majority eventually report being glad to be alive. But for the terminally ill who face suffering that we know will increase, only the stonehearted can be unsympathetic.”

— Atul Gawande

229. “The goal is to use explicit, logical, statistical thinking instead of just your gut.”

— Atul Gawande

230. “Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.”

— Atul Gawande

231. “Errors are too common and widespread to be explained so simply.”

— Atul Gawande

232. “For the solution to chronic pain may lie more in what goes on around us than in what is going on inside us.”

— Atul Gawande

233. “When things go wrong, it’s almost impossible for a physician to talk to a patient honestly about mistakes.”

— Atul Gawande

234. “The way that things go wrong in medicine is normally unseen and, consequently, often misunderstood.”

— Atul Gawande

235. “Patients ask questions, look up information on the Internet, seek second opinions. And they decide.”

— Atul Gawande

236. “At most, a doctor might say, “I’m sorry that things didn’t go as well as we had hoped.”

— Atul Gawande

237. “Human judgment, even expert human judgment, falls well short of certainty.”

— Atul Gawande

238. “But once he put his recommendations down on paper it was hard for hospitals and medical groups not to follow through and hold doctors to the plan.”

— Atul Gawande

239. “They were regarded as children: too fragile and simpleminded to handle the truth, let alone make decisions.”

— Atul Gawande

240. “After a while, though, it seemed that the only thing he thought about was getting through all his patients as quickly as possible.”

— Atul Gawande

241. “It is a reality of medicine that choosing to not do something – to not order a test, to not give an antibiotic, to not take a patient to the operating room – is far harder than choosing to do it.”

— Atul Gawande

242. “And they missed out on treatments that they might have preferred.”

— Atul Gawande

243. “But the truth of the matter is that it tends to raise as many questions as it answers.”

— Atul Gawande

244. “Some I am fortunate to still keep up with. Others I was never given the chance to know as well as I wish I could have. All of them have taught me more than any could know.”

— Atul Gawande

245. “Human beings have an ability to simply recognize the right thing to do sometimes. Judgment, Klein points out, is rarely a calculated weighing of all options, which we are not good at anyway, but instead an unconscious form of pattern recognition.”

— Atul Gawande

246. “Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off – or even alive.”

— Atul Gawande

247. “Yet compassion and technology aren’t necessarily incompatible; they can be mutually reinforcing.”

— Atul Gawande

248. “As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.”

— Atul Gawande