187 Quotes by William Osler

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

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

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

It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.

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.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

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

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

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