Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “About God I could say nothing definitive, of course, but the basic reality of human life stands compellingly against blind determinism.”

— Paul Kalanithi

202. “Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn’t “Feel guilty all the time.” Maybe it is more along these lines: “We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can’t live up to it all the time.” Maybe that’s what the message of the New Testament is, after all. Even if you have a notion as well defined as Leviticus, you can’t live that way. It’s not just impossible, it’s insane.”

— Paul Kalanithi

203. “Death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to the fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve, a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day.”

— Paul Kalanithi

204. “My patient needs lobster and steak – right away!” Turning back to her, he said, with a smile: “It’s on the way, but it may look more like a turkey sandwich.” The.”

— Paul Kalanithi

205. “V maintained that our only obligation was to be authentic to the scientific story and to tell it uncompromisingly. I’d never met someone so successful who was also so committed to goodness.”

— Paul Kalanithi

206. “Being with patients in these moments certainly had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. I don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life – and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul – was obvious in its sacredness.”

— Paul Kalanithi

207. “Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked. “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”

— Paul Kalanithi

208. “Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.”

— Paul Kalanithi

209. “But here’s the thing I must come back to: the prose was unforgettable. Out of his pen he was spinning gold.”

— Paul Kalanithi

210. “One night on the sofa in my apartment, while studying the reams of wavy lines that make up EKGs, she puzzled over, then correctly identified, a fatal arrhythmia. All at once, it dawned on her and she began to cry: wherever this “practice EKG” had come from, the patient had not survived. The squiggly lines on that page were more than just lines; they were ventricular fibrillation deteriorating the asystole, and they could bring you to tears.”

— Paul Kalanithi

211. “The definitive test was the simplest: I raised the patient’s arm above his face and let go. A patient in a psychogenic coma retains just enough volition to avoid hitting himself. The treatment consists in speaking reassuringly, until your words connect and the patient awakens.”

— Paul Kalanithi

212. “Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”

— Paul Kalanithi

213. “Even working on the dead, with their faces covered, their names a mystery, you find that their humanity pops up at you – in opening my cadaver’s stomach, I found two undigested morphine pills, meaning that he had died in pain, perhaps alone and fumbling with the cap of a pill bottle.”

— Paul Kalanithi

214. “Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love – to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.”

— Paul Kalanithi

215. “People often ask if it was calling. My answer always is yes.”

— Paul Kalanithi

216. “Being with patients in these moments certainly had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. I don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it.”

— Paul Kalanithi

217. “Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive, and fierce a career as you can find, full of the temptation to find easy paths.”

— Paul Kalanithi

218. “Neurocardiogenic syncope,” I whispered to myself. The autonomic nervous system briefly shutting down the heart. Or, as it’s more commonly known, a case of the nerves.”

— Paul Kalanithi

219. “Maybe I’d been cursed by a Greek god, but abdicating control seemed irresponsible, if not impossible.”

— Paul Kalanithi

220. “A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.”

— Paul Kalanithi

221. “Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes.”

— Paul Kalanithi

222. “Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line.”

— Paul Kalanithi

223. “I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe.”

— Paul Kalanithi

224. “The armament varies, from prayer to wealth to herbs to stem cells.”

— Paul Kalanithi

225. “Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity – sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness – because I found them so compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”

— Paul Kalanithi

226. “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.”

— Paul Kalanithi

227. “The version of Paul I miss most, more even than the robust, dazzling version whom I first fell in love, is the beautiful, focused man he was in his last year. The Paul who wrote this book. Frail, but never weak.”

— Paul Kalanithi

228. “My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life. Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”

— Paul Kalanithi

229. “A son’s death already defies the parents’ ordered universe; how much more incomprehensible is it when the patient is brain-dead, his body warm, his heart still beating?”

— Paul Kalanithi

230. “As a doctor, you have a sense of what it’s like to be sick, but until you’ve gone through it yourself, you don’t really know.”

— Paul Kalanithi

231. “Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, as at the end of that Sunday’s reading, the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that “One sows and another reaps.” I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work. –.”

— Paul Kalanithi

232. “That Paul and I formed part of the deep meaning of each other’s lives is one of the greatest blessings that has ever come to me. Both.”

— Paul Kalanithi

233. “We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.”

— Paul Kalanithi

234. “A match flickers but does not light.”

— Paul Kalanithi

235. “Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. – T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality” I.”

— Paul Kalanithi

236. “I remember Nuland, in the opening chapters of How We Die, writing about being a young medical student alone in the OR with a patient whose heart had stopped. In an act of desperation, he cut open the patient’s chest and tried to pump his heart manually, tried to literally squeeze the life back into him. The patient died, and Nuland was found by his supervisor, covered in blood and failure.”

— Paul Kalanithi

237. “Why was I so authoritative in a surgeon’s coat but so meek in a patient’s gown?”

— Paul Kalanithi

238. “The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills.”

— Paul Kalanithi

239. “After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books.”

— Paul Kalanithi

240. “Always eat with your left hand. You’ve got to learn to be ambidextrous.”

— Paul Kalanithi

241. “Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.”

— Paul Kalanithi

242. “One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany – a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters – and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward. Now I would have to work around it.”

— Paul Kalanithi

243. “The mind was simply the operation of the brain.”

— Paul Kalanithi

244. “A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing.”

— Paul Kalanithi

245. “The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis. Sometimes.”

— Paul Kalanithi

246. “Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room.”

— Paul Kalanithi

247. “At home in bed a few weeks before he died, I asked him, “Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?” His answer was “It’s.”

— Paul Kalanithi

248. “It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any.”

— Paul Kalanithi

249. “Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes be crushed by the weight.”

— Paul Kalanithi

250. “Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering.”

— Paul Kalanithi