Nick Gehlfuss Quotes

When you walk through the hospital, you waiver between feeling bad for everyone else and feeling bad for yourself. It's a war of the worlds - the healthy and the sick.

The glimpses of human strength and frailty that a physician sees are with me still.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

She's lonely and wounded and very vulnerable and it really is a story about people at the heart of it all.

There's something universal about illness... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.'

Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always.

I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.

All should take care of the sick

Many of us have experienced the pain that comes with watching a loved one suffer with a serious illness. We also know that we would do absolutely anything it takes to help them beat it.

When you're dealing with a sick person, you're not important at all. You're just a nobody.

Trials are medicines which our gracious and wise Physician prescribes because we need them; and he proportions the frequency and weight of them to what the case requires. Let us trust his skill and thank him for his prescription.

Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk.

People talked to me in a way I think they would not have talked to somebody who hadn't shared the experience; they gave me their papers, they gave me their diaries. I found people constantly opening up to me. And I think they did because I had shared that experience with them.

Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.

I understand what it's like to go to hospitals and there's no medicine, and the best thing you have to give the patients is compassion.

I've spent more time in hospitals than some fellows ever spend in church.

I've been very ill. You just have to trust the Lord.

When we are well, we all have good advice for those who are ill.

When you are in the midst of suffering you are looking for someone to be Jesus to you. You are looking for someone to love you and help take care of you, and reach out to you.

A surgeon is surrounded by people who are sick, discouraged, afraid, embittered, dying - but also courageous, loving, wise, compassionate and alive.

In the sick room, ten cents' worth of human understanding equals ten dollars' worth of medical science.

People who are sick, or who have been sick, or have come close to death have a lot to say - and they want you to hear it.

I think health care is more about love than about most other things. If there isn't at the core of this two human beings who have agreed to be in a relationship where one is trying to help relieve the suffering of another, which is love, you can't get to the right answer here.

My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments.

Does anyone really go into nursing intending to be apathetic, cold and removed from suffering? I find that very difficult to believe.