“He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.”

Make something beautiful of your life.

When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.

I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,

I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.

Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.

You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. .

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.

What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.

My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.

When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.

We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.

If one door closes and another does not open, try climbing thru a window, either way, make your way in.

The special forces gave me the self-confidence to do some extraordinary things in my life. Climbing Everest then cemented my belief in myself.

All my life the only thing I’ve been good at has been climbing and throwing myself off big things.

If you want someone to be ignored then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town. It doesn’t matter how great you were, it’ll always take an unfunny drunk with climbing skills to make people notice you.

There’s no magic to running far or climbing Everest. Endurance is mental strength. It’s all about heart.

If you want someone to be ignored then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town. It doesn’t matter how great you were, it’ll always take an unfunny drunk with climbing skills to make people notice you.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.

Press forward at all times, climbing forward toward that higher ground of the harmonious society that shapes the laws of man to the laws of God.