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.
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.
In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
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.
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.
What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
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.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
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.
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.
