Ellen DeGeneres Quotes

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

Orion brightened. "I have an idea." "Yes?" said Foaly, daring to hope that a spark of Artemis remained. "Why don't we look for some magic stones that can grant wishes? Or, if that doesn't work, you could search my naked body for some mysterious birthmark that means I am actually the prince of somewhere or other.

I enjoyed teaching. I liked the students. Having to formulate my ideas about literature made them clearer. I did not particularly enjoy the more bureaucratic aspects of the job. However, if you are teaching fervently, your energy and time are used up at a great rate.

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there.

The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.

To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology.

It often happens that the universal belief of one age of mankind — a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time be free — becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

Men want to be reminded, who do not want to be taught; because those original ideas of rectitude to which the mind is compelled to assent when they are proposed, are not always as present to us as they ought to be.

"Doctor, I have a ringing in my ears." "Don't answer!"

Vaclav Havel was the most amazing man in terms of being the combination of somebody with massive moral authority, great courage for having espoused the concepts of democracy, freedom throughout a very difficult communist period, a very modest man, and somebody with a fabulous sense of humor and the idea of being able to see the absurd in situations.

The idea that you're supposed to do everything on your own is absurd. You can't.

To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.

I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.

True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.

Competence is a big word. It is important. I almost want to nuance it with the idea of giftedness because sometimes you can teach a lot of skills on exposition but a person may not have the competence or the giftedness to do it. Therefore, it is very important to have that.

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.

This idea that people have to love and understand each other is absurd. It's not human nature.

The ultimate joke was the idea that capitalism would eat its own feces in order to make money, that would make fun of itself if capitalism thought there was a buck in it.

Lungs, they do not like to be messed with. I give pneumonia one star and that's for the silent p.

The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.)

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.