William Osler

"To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals — this alone is worth the struggle."

"To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all."

"When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances fit in with them."

"Every one of you will have to face the ordeal of every student in this generation who sooner or later tries to mix the waters of science with the oil of faith. You can have a good deal of both if you …"

"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…"

"Let me recall to your minds an incident related of that best of men and wisest of rulers, Antoninus Pius, who, as he lay dying, in his home at Loriam in Etruria, summed up the philosophy of life in th…"

"Shakespeare gets to the root of the alcohol question in his well-known statement—'Good wine is a good, familiar creature if it be well used.'"

"The critical sense and sceptical attitude of the Hippocratic school laid the foundations of modern medicine on broad lines, and we owe to it: first, the emancipation of medicine from the shackles of p…"