Top 120 William Osler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.”

— William Osler

52. “Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise – the quadrangle of health.”

— William Osler

53. “Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows.”

— William Osler

54. “The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.”

— William Osler

55. “A well-trained, sensible doctor is one of the most valuable assets of a community.”

— William Osler

56. “The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.”

— William Osler

57. “Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.”

— William Osler

58. “The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles...”

— William Osler

59. “The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.”

— William Osler

60. “One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.”

— William Osler

61. “To do today’s work well and not to bother about tomorrow is the secret of accomplishment.”

— William Osler

62. “In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.”

— William Osler

63. “No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.”

— William Osler

64. “To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.”

— William Osler

65. “Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.”

— William Osler

66. “Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise...”

— William Osler

67. “Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places in life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted and will console you in the sad hours.”

— William Osler

68. “Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.”

— William Osler

69. “The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.”

— William Osler

70. “Without faith a man can do nothing; with it all things are possible.”

— William Osler

71. “Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher’s stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.”

— William Osler

72. “Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.”

— William Osler

73. “There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.”

— William Osler

74. “Imperturbability means coolness and presence of mind under all circumstances, calmness amid storm, clearness of judgment in moments of grave peril, immobility, impassiveness, or, to use an old and expressive word, phlegm.”

— William Osler

75. “Conservatism and old fogeyism are totally different things; the motto of one is “Prove all things and hold fast that which is good” and of the other “Prove nothing but hold fast that which is old.””

— William Osler

76. “Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.”

— William Osler

77. “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.”

— William Osler

78. “The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.”

— William Osler

79. “The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.”

— William Osler

80. “Too many men slip early out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential.”

— William Osler

81. “In the first place, in the physician or surgeon no quality takes rank with imperturbability, and I propose for a few minutes to direct your attention to this essential bodily virtue.”

— William Osler

82. “To it, more than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had – to this power of settling down to the day’s work and trying to do it to the best of one’s ability, and letting the future take care of itself.”

— William Osler

83. “A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.”

— William Osler

84. “One of the first essentials in securing a good-natured equanimity is not to expect too much of the people amongst whom you dwell.”

— William Osler

85. “Avoid wine and women – choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.”

— William Osler

86. “It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead.”

— William Osler

87. “The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life’s problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.”

— William Osler

88. “It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep: far from it, they are awake – many of them at any rate – to the importance of the scientific study of disease.”

— William Osler

89. “The teacher’s life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.”

— William Osler

90. “Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.”

— William Osler

91. “No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, hearts are broken, heads are turned.”

— William Osler

92. “Nothing is life is more wonderful than faith.”

— William Osler

93. “Advice is sought to confirm a position already taken.”

— William Osler

94. “Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.”

— William Osler

95. “Beware of people who call you ‘Doc.’ They rarely pay their bills.”

— William Osler

96. “We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?”

— William Osler

97. “We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences.”

— William Osler

98. “The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.”

— William Osler

99. “We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.”

— William Osler

100. “A man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty-or never!”

— William Osler