Top 120 William Osler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

— William Osler

Featured in: Care Quotes, Caring Quotes, Healing Quotes, Health Quotes, Medicine Quotes

2. “The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.”

— William Osler

Featured in: Care Quotes, Practice Quotes, Compassion Quotes, Helping Quotes, Healing Quotes

3. “He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.”

— William Osler

4. “Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”

— William Osler

5. “Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.”

— William Osler

Featured in: Health Quotes

6. “If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.”

— William Osler

7. “Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day absorb all your interest, energy and enthusiasm. The best preparation for tomorrow is to live today superbly well.”

— William Osler

8. “The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.”

— William Osler

9. “The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.”

— William Osler

10. “No man is really happy or safe without a hobby...”

— William Osler

11. “He who knows syphilis knows medicine.”

— William Osler

12. “Be calm and strong and patient. Meet failure and disappointment with courage. Rise superior to the trials of life, and never give in to hopelessness or despair. In danger, in adversity, cling to your principles and ideals. Aequanimitas!”

— William Osler

13. “We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.”

— William Osler

14. “What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.”

— William Osler

15. “Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.”

— William Osler

16. “Every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he suffers.”

— William Osler

17. “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.”

— William Osler

18. “The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.”

— William Osler

19. “There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.”

— William Osler

20. “To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle.”

— William Osler

21. “It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.”

— William Osler

22. “Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. Half of what we have taught you is in error, and furthermore we cannot tell you which half it is.”

— William Osler

23. “Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.”

— William Osler

24. “The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.”

— William Osler

25. “The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.”

— William Osler

26. “The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.”

— William Osler

27. “There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.”

— William Osler

28. “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”

— William Osler

29. “Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.”

— William Osler

30. “Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day.”

— William Osler

31. “The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.”

— William Osler

32. “Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day’s work.”

— William Osler

33. “The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.”

— William Osler

34. “It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.”

— William Osler

35. “The most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship.”

— William Osler

36. “Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.”

— William Osler

37. “To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.”

— William Osler

38. “A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.”

— William Osler

39. “Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.”

— William Osler

40. “The very first step toward success in any occupation is to become interested in it. Locke put this in a very happy way when he said, give a pupil “a relish of knowledge” and you put life into his work.”

— William Osler

41. “Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.”

— William Osler

42. “By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy-indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.”

— William Osler

43. “There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.”

— William Osler

44. “Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.”

— William Osler

45. “In the Mortality Bills, pneumonia is an easy second, to tuberculosis; indeed in many cities the death-rate is now higher and it has become, to use the phrase of Bunyan ‘the captain of the men of death.’”

— William Osler

46. “Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.”

— William Osler

47. “The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.”

— William Osler

48. “I desire no other epitaph – no hurry about it, I may say – than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do.”

— William Osler

49. “Laughter is the music of life.”

— William Osler

50. “No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.”

— William Osler