Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.
The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.
Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.
To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
Avoid wine and women – choose a freckly-faced girl for a wife; they are invariably more amiable.
What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life.
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.
No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, hearts are broken, heads are turned.
One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.
Faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off.
Engrossed late and soon in professional cares, getting and spending, you may may so lay waste your powers that you may find, too late, with hearts given away, that t here is no place in your habit-stricken souls for those gentler influences which make your life worth living.
Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise...
Laughter is the music of life.
To it, more than to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had – to this power of settling down to the day’s work and trying to do it to the best of one’s ability, and letting the future take care of itself.
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.
For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him.
It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at full speed ahead.
The Scots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts – head, heart and haggis.