241 Quotes by Paul Kalanithi

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

I needed words to go forward.

With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.

After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.

Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases.

Paul faced each stage of his illness with grace – not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would “overcome” or “beat” cancer but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned and forge a new one.

Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.

Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society’s most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.

I was pursuing medicine to bear witness to the twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biological manifestations: at once deeply personal and utterly impersonal.