Physician Quotes

“Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.”

“Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.”

“Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.”

“Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.”

“You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.”

“Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.”

“See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.”

“Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.”

“Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.”

“Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.”

“To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”

“Man has his will, but woman has her way.”

“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.”

“Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.”

“Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?”

“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”

“The best servant does his work unseen.”

“The thinking man must oppose all cruelties no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo.”

“What we call love is in its essence reverence for life.”

“Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life.”

“The destiny of man is to be more and more human.”

“I have given up the ambition to be a great scholar. I want to be more- simply a human. . . . We are not true humans, but beings who live by a civilization inherited from the past, that keeps us hostage, that confines us. No freedom of movement. Nothing. Everything in us is killed by our calculations for our future, by our social position and cast. You see, I am not happy-yet I am happy. I suffer, but that is part of life. I live, I don't care about my existence, and that is the beginning of wisdom.”

“The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.”

“Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.”

“The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.”