Atul Gawande Quotes

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.

Truth in all its kinds is most difficult to win; and truth in medicine is the most difficult of all.

People think you go to doctors for their knowledge. You don't go to doctors for their knowledge. You go to doctors for their judgment, their instinct, what to do, how to make the right call.

So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It'll be fun. I guarantee. I can't guarantee we'll find the goddamn thing, but it'll be interesting. Then if we do find it - if we do- the payoff's huge.

My money's riding on this dark horse, baby My heart is sayin' it's the lucky one And its true color's gonna shine through someday If we let this Let this dark horse run

I was always lucky that I've always had a gig, I'm fortunate in that way.

I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.

I love any challenge that comes my way, and I've been lucky to have many.

It's strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined.

It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to.

Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.

If you don't know what you want, don't say you never had a chance.

The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose.

The only safe thing is to take a chance.

I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity.

Bad chances were better than no chances.

It's a miracle when something actually turns out well because there are so many ways for it to go wrong.

Don't wait for answers, just take your chances. Don't ask me why.

...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.

Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it -- and a greater fool if you count upon it.

The only thing I do know is that from chaos comes opportunity.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.