Science Quote by William Osler

Osler takes a scalpel to intellectual vanity. The line isn’t a lament about ignorance so much as a clinical warning: if you demand “absolute truth,” you’ll end up mistaking your hunger for certainty as evidence of it. His phrasing works because it’s aspirational and deflationary in the same breath. “Seeking” grants science its moral dignity - the pursuit matters - while “unattainable” snaps the romance with a hard limit. Then he offers the only workable ethic: accept “broken portions,” the fragments that survive honest observation.

The subtext is a rebuke to both dogma and the era’s intoxicating faith in total systems. Osler lived at the hinge of modern medicine, when germ theory, pathology, and laboratory methods were rapidly rearranging what doctors could claim to know. In that world, certainty was dangerous: it could fossilize into doctrine, excuse sloppy inference, or encourage physicians to treat patients as proof of a theory rather than people with messy, partial data.

“Broken portions” is the key image. It makes knowledge tactile, like shards from an excavation: valuable, sharp-edged, incomplete. It also implies humility as a professional discipline, not a personality trait. Osler’s intent is pragmatic - build medicine (and by extension any science) on provisional truths, replicable findings, and cautious generalizations. The quote flatters the human desire to understand, then reminds us that the job is to live responsibly inside the limits of what can be known.