“We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.”

In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.

The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice.

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Geography is destiny.

Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It’s a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve;.

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “

Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…

I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.

They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.

Archaeopteryx probably cannot tell us much about the early origins of feathers and flight in true protobirds because Archaeopteryx was, in the modern sense, a bird.

I write early in the morning, usually after reading portions of at least half a dozen newspapers on the web.

I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books.

Events of early Monday July 14, 1958 [Coup in Iraq] had convinced me that hate is the most destructive force in our life.

I can’t say enough good things about my band. I feel very fortunate that I found them when I did, very early in my career.

Early on in my life I comprehended that death is the most tragic event in our life.

The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.