Science Quote by William Osler

A scientist telling you to stop treating life like a vending machine is doing more than offering homespun virtue. Osler’s line is a piece of professional ethic smuggled into a life philosophy: a reversal of the usual moral math where the world is a storehouse of rewards, status, and security. He’s proposing an older, sterner accounting system - contribution over consumption - and he does it with deceptively plain language that lands like a corrective.

The sentence works because of its symmetry. “Add” versus “get” turns existence into a ledger, but not a cold one; it implies a kind of creative agency. You’re not just “helping” life along, you’re augmenting it. That verb choice matters for a physician-scientist working in an era when modern medicine was professionalizing, hospital systems were hardening into hierarchies, and prestige was becoming its own currency. Osler helped shape medical training; he watched ambition become indistinguishable from service in the eyes of institutions. The quote draws a bright line.

Subtext: the real danger isn’t wanting comfort, it’s building an identity around extraction. For a clinician, “getting” can look like hoarding credit, chasing titles, treating patients as cases. For a broader audience, it’s the same critique aimed at a society learning to market the self. Osler’s austerity is tactical: if you measure your days by what you “get,” you’re always behind; if you measure by what you “add,” you’re harder to buy, flatter, or fracture.