Professions & Roles: Doctor Quotes

Explore thoughtful quotes that honor doctors - their commitment to care, scientific rigor, and human connection. These selections touch on empathy at the bedside, the discipline of practice, and the resilience needed in uncertainty. Voices range from medical pioneers to contemporary clinicians and patients, offering brief insights for reflection, study, or daily motivation. Whether in training, practicing, or simply curious about the healing profession, find words that illuminate purpose, ethics, teamwork, and the art of listening.

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"Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician"

Chris Hadfield, Astronaut

Chris Hadfield

"My intent was to carry out my duty as a doctor, to end their suffering. Unfortunately, that entailed, in their cases, ending of the life"

Jack Kevorkian, Activist

Jack Kevorkian

"A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world"

Harvey Cushing, Scientist

"The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him"

Sigmund Freud, Psychologist

Sigmund Freud

"I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words"

Albert Schweitzer, Theologian

Albert Schweitzer

"The only difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too"

Anton Chekhov, Dramatist

Anton Chekhov

"Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals"

Napoleon Bonaparte, Leader

Napoleon Bonaparte

"A doctor must work eighteen hours a day and seven days a week. If you cannot console yourself to this, get out of the profession"

Martin H. Fischer, Author

"We'd like to have immediate answers to all of our questions. I think medicine in particular. I found it frustrating as a physician sometimes to not be able to tell someone exactly why something was happening to them. There are still so many mysteries in medicine"

Laurel Clark, Astronaut

Laurel Clark

"As a physician, I understand how important it is to collect data on people so we can understand what's happening with them. I will be in the position to help enable that knowledge"

Laurel Clark, Astronaut

Laurel Clark

"Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm"

Hippocrates, Scientist

"As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don't know what they're saying"

David M. Brown, Astronaut

"He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all"

William Osler, Scientist

"Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis"

Alfred P. Sloan, Businessman

Alfred P. Sloan

"The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes"

Desiderius Erasmus, Philosopher

Desiderius Erasmus

"To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance"

Charles Babbage, Mathematician

Charles Babbage

"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died"

Erma Bombeck, Journalist

Erma Bombeck

"A physician without a knowledge of Astrology has no right to call himself a physician"

Hippocrates, Scientist

"Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity"

Hippocrates, Scientist

"One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine"

William Osler, Scientist

"The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases"

William Osler, Scientist

"The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals"

William Osler, Scientist

"What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist"

Jonathan Miller, Entertainer

"We strive for error-free medicine in a world that is sometimes all too human"

Michael Burgess, Congressman

Michael Burgess

"The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning"

Lewis Thomas, Scientist

"Fort Smith, being the place of my longest stay, was the scene of my largest medical practice"

Ernest Thompson Seton, Leader

"As a physician, I know many doctors want to utilize new technology, but they find the cost prohibitive"

Nathan Deal, Politician

"Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided"

Paracelsus, Scientist

"That made me think I could contribute more to society by looking at people on the autopsy table and feeding back the findings so that lots of people could benefit, rather than just treating patients one at a time"

Michael Baden, Celebrity

"Honestly, being a doctor could make you more close minded than regular people"

Alex Chiu, Businessman

"I completed medical school at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in 1984"

Samuel Wilson, Public Servant

"One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience"

Alice James, Writer

Alice James

"I recently went to a new doctor and noticed he was located in something called the Professional Building. I felt better right away"

George Carlin, Comedian

George Carlin

"For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?"

Virginia Woolf, Author

Virginia Woolf

"A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war"

Samuel Butler, Poet

Samuel Butler

"A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct"

Samuel Butler, Poet

Samuel Butler

"There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring"

Ashley Montagu, Scientist

Ashley Montagu

"Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too"

Anton Chekhov, Dramatist

Anton Chekhov

"Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too"

Anton Chekhov, Dramatist

Anton Chekhov

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