A commonplace book — quotations I keep coming back to.
Medicine can only be learned at the bedside. If you’re married, you’re at the wrong bedside.
— L.H. Clerf
The problems, the solutions are before our very eyes. We were born with a brain…, let’s use it…, think…, think, think…, think, man…, think! It’s thinking that separates us from other forms of life. Always test…, challenge…, evaluate. Never accept anything without questioning its sources…, the reasons for its being written or said…, the background of those who are propagating the idea or entity. Always look beyond the apparent. The obvious is often distorted…, camouflaged by our biases, by our prejudices, by our wishful thinking, by our inadequacies.
— L.H. Clerf
The missing legs
Of the amputee are away somewhere
Winning a secret race….— Jon Mukand, The Handicapped
We have met the enemy and he is us.
— Pogo
Who better than the surgeon is aware of the awesome responsibility which is his when a trusting patient places his life in his hands, when a split-second decision in the operating room, a move of the hand, can make a difference between life and death…. It is not surprising that to many surgeons their calling becomes almost a religion with the operating suite the temple of their devotions.
— Dr Carl Schlicke
To the best of my ability and judgment I will practice the art of medicine only for the benefit of my patients.
— Hippocratic Oath
May the love for my art activate me at all times. May neither avarice nor miserliness, nor the thirst for glory, nor for a great reputation engage my mind; for the enemies of truth and philanthropy could easily deceive me and make me forgetful of my lofty aim of doing good to thy children…. Oh God, thou has appointed me to watch over the life and death of thy creatures.
— Maimonides
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
— Albert Einstein
The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.
— Sir William Osler
There are men and classes of men that stand above the common herd: the soldier, the sailor, and the shepherd not infrequently; the artist rarely; rarelier still, the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule. He is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization; and when that stage of man is done with, and only remembered to be marveled at in history, he will be thought to have shared as little as any in the defects of the period, and most notably exhibited the virtues of the race. Generosity he has, such as is possible to those who practice an art, never to those who drive a trade; discretion, tested by a hundred secrets; tact, tried in a thousand embarrassments; and what are more important, Heraclean cheerfulness and courage. So it is that he brings air and cheer into the sickroom, and often enough, though not as often as he wishes, brings healing.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
There are qualities beyond pure medical competence that patients need and look for in their physicians. They want reassurance. They want to be looked after and not just looked over. They want to be listened to. They want to feel that it makes a difference to the physician, a very big difference, whether they live or die. They want to feel that they are in the physician’s thoughts.
— Norman Cousins
Bible, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Plutarch’s Lives, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Browne’s Religio Medici, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Breakfast-table” series.
— Osler’s bedside library for medical students
Halsted’s ward rounds were known as “shifting dullness.”
— Peter D. Olch
Are we prolonging life, or are we simply prolonging death?
— Denton Cooley
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
— Bertrand Russell, A Liberal Decalogue
Of course, biologists are not just laboratory people that mix liquids in test tubes. Most of their time is devoted to the discussion of ideas and to the replacement of these ideas with better ones.
— Niels K. Jerne, 1984 Nobel banquet speech
Einstein was asked about the testing of the general theory of relativity: “How would you have felt if the displacements did not agree?”
Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord; the theory is correct.
— Albert Einstein
Sir Peter Medawar, drawing on Alfred Lotka, distinguished between endosomatic (internal, genetic) heredity and exosomatic (external) heredity, defining the latter as “the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own — the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.” In this spirit, we can think of many contemporary technologies as exosomatic organs: dialysis machines act as exosomatic kidneys, ventilators in intensive care function as exosomatic lungs, and computers serve as exosomatic brains, since for many tasks their information-processing functions are strikingly brain-like. The conceptual framework and quoted definition are Medawar’s; the medical and technological examples are modern applications of his exosomatic idea.
— Sir Peter Medawar, The Future of Man
Stable complex systems usually take the form of a hierarchy, where each system is built from simpler subsystems and each subsystem is built from simpler subsystems still.
— Herbert A. Simon, The Architecture of Complexity
The best way to avoid cancer is to run from salad bar to salad bar.
— folk humor
On current trends, tobacco will kill vastly more people than many of the 20th century’s most violent catastrophes. Epidemiological analyses led by Sir Richard Peto estimate that smoking caused around 100 million deaths in the 20th century and could cause about 1 billion deaths in the 21st century if present patterns persist. Even using conservative estimates that place total deaths from 20th-century wars at well under 200 million, this implies that, without major reductions in tobacco use, smoking will claim the lives of far more people alive today than died in all the century’s wars and revolutions combined.
— after Sir Richard Peto
My lamp is almost extinguished; I hope it has burned for the benefit of others.
— Percival Pott, on the day before he died
Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
This is th’ imposthume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies.— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 4, lines 26–30 (Hamlet speaking)
Major cancer authorities emphasize that many cancers are linked to lifestyle and that a large share of cancer risk can be reduced by healthy choices in areas such as tobacco use, diet, activity, weight, alcohol, and sun exposure.
— CDC, AICR, and WHO
Building on decades of experimental work, Lee W. Wattenberg — often described as the “father of cancer chemoprevention” — demonstrated that specific chemicals, including dietary constituents, can block or suppress carcinogenesis before invasive cancer develops.
— after Dr. Lee W. Wattenberg
A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.
— King James VI and I of England, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604)
Ubuntu, in Zulu and Xhosa: humanity toward others. Philosophically, “I am because we are” or “a person is a person through other persons” — stressing interconnectedness, mutual care, and shared humanity. The belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.
A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
— Desmond Tutu
When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, “All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed.” So this has been my lifetime motto — I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable.
— Mikhail T. Kalashnikov
Audentes Fortuna iuvat. (Fortune favors the bold/brave.)
— Virgil, Aeneid (Turnus speaking)
Fortes Fortuna adiuvat. (Fortune favors the brave/strong.)
— Terence, Phormio, line 203
No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.
— what the beaver told the rabbit at the base of Hoover Dam, as recalled by physicist and Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes
Older English rendering in Goethe’s Faust:
The glorious retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil,
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!A glorious dream! though now the glories fade.
Alas! the wings that lift the mind no aid of wings to lift the body can bequeath me.— Goethe, Faust
A. Z. Foreman’s translation of Faust’s sunset speech renders the core idea:
I want wings to take me up out there
To strive and follow on! …
It is a gorgeous dream.
The sun must flee.
Alas! These spirit wings will never be
Bodily wings conjoined on which to fly!— Goethe, Faust (trans. A. Z. Foreman)
Daily work — my hands’ employment,
To complete is pure enjoyment!
Let, oh, let me never falter!
No! there is no empty dreaming:
Lo! these trees, but bare poles seeming,
Yet will yield both fruit and shelter!— Goethe, Hope
Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.
— attributed to Voltaire (not securely sourced)
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
— attributed to Voltaire
Messieurs, c’est les microbes qui auront le dernier mot.
Gentlemen, it’s the microbes who will have the last word.
— attributed to Louis Pasteur
Three original lines that can be safely used without attribution:
Don’t crush your rebels; listen to them — rebellion is often just loyalty that refuses to be silent.
Wise leaders don’t punish rebels; they harness their defiance to change what no one else dares to touch.
Every rebel is a stress test of the system: punish them and you learn nothing; engage them and you might evolve.
— Perplexity
From Jacob Bronowski’s lecture “The Sense of Human Dignity” in Science and Human Values:
Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.
Variant: As originality and independence are private needs for the existence of a science, so dissent and freedom are its public needs.
Values in science: privately, originality and independence; publicly, dissent, freedom, and tolerance. Safeguards: e.g., free inquiry, free thought, free speech, tolerance.
— Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values
No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp border exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:
- to respond to situations very flexibly;
- to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;
- to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages;
- to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation;
- to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;
- to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them;
- to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways;
- to come up with ideas which are novel.
— Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Peano’s axioms for the natural numbers, in their core form:
- Zero (or 1, in some versions) is a natural number.
- Every natural number has a unique “successor,” which is also a natural number.
- Zero is not the successor of any natural number.
- If two numbers have the same successor, then they are equal.
- (Induction) Any set of natural numbers that contains zero and is closed under the successor operation contains all natural numbers.
— Giuseppe Peano
Je pense, donc je suis.
Cogito, ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am.
— René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637)
Ego sum, ego existo.
I am, I exist.
— René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Historian W. E. H. Lecky, in Democracy and Liberty (1899), recounts a story in which Faraday explains a scientific discovery to William Gladstone (then Chancellor of the Exchequer). Gladstone asks, “But, after all, what use is it?” and Faraday reportedly replies:
Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it!
— Michael Faraday
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
— Richard P. Feynman (note on his Caltech blackboard at the time of his death)
Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.
— Feynmanism (weakly sourced)
A good scientist thinks logically and accurately … when he has a sufficient number of well-founded facts …
— Linus Pauling, Imagination in Science (Tomorrow, December 1943)
The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.
— Benjamin Franklin
Compared to the pond of knowledge, our ignorance remains atlantic.
— Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith, eds., The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense (1905), p. 284
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
— Sir Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke (1676)
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
— attributed to Winston Churchill
O, Sibili, si emgo.
Fortibuses i naro.
O nobili demis trux.
Vatis inem? Caos au dux.Oh, see Billy, see them go.
Forty buses in a row.
Oh, no, Billy, them is trucks.
See what’s in ’em? Cows and ducks.— anonymous Dog Latin / schoolroom mock-Latin verse
James, while John had had “had,” had had “had had”; “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher.
— anonymous English grammar / punctuation puzzle
Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me:
Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.— Proverbs 30:8–9, KJV
The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know.
— anonymous modern maxim
Don’t sweat the small stuff … and it’s all small stuff.
— Richard Carlson (1997)
Wise men never say what they think of women.
— Samuel Butler, as quoted by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
I appreciate that there are two sides to this issue. But I cannot be on both sides at the same time.
— anonymous (attribution unverified)
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