Skip to content

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

— William Osler

Another quote →

Topics

Wisdom

More quotes by William Osler

Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals — this alone is worth the struggle.

Sir William Osler : Aphorisms (1950)

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.

The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest, and not inferior to either in her mission.

Address at Johns Hopkins Hospital (1897)

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

The Life of Sir William Osler (1925)

All William Osler quotes →

You may also like

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.

George Chapman All Fools (1605)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Osler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.