William Osler Quotes

Truly novel inventions emerge only in one's youth. Later one becomes ever more experienced, famous-and foolish.

When we make mistakes they call it evil

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.

Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.

It’s a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution.

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

Newt Gingrich called it [Donald] Trump's biggest mistake since he won the election, these crazy accusations about voter fraud.

If we could be twice young and twice old we could correct all our mistakes.

Sometimes to think about why some institutions are stable, it's interesting to go one generation back and look at the author of that stability.

If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.

It is Chairman Mao who should be held primarily responsible for the Great Leap Forward. But it didn't take him long - just a few months - to recognize his mistake, and he did so before the rest of us and proposed corrections. And in 1962, when because of some other factors those corrections had not been fully carried out, he made a self-criticism. But the lessons were not fully drawn, and as a result the "Cultural Revolution" erupted.

In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.

All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.

Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.

It would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant.

Of all the ingenious mistakes into which erring man has fallen, perhaps none have been so pernicious in their consequences, or have brought so many evils into the world, as the popular opinion that the way of the transgressor is pleasant and easy.

We've all made mistakes, they are not toxic and evil.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

When you're dealing with something sensitive, which is about culture, and its effect on a generation, you don't want any stones not to be turned over.

It's rare when an artist's talent can touch an entire generation of people. It's even rarer when that same influence affects several generations. Elvis made an imprint on the world of pop music unequaled by any other single performer.

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

It is much easier at all times to prevent an evil than to rectify mistakes.

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.