Paul Kalanithi quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Paul Kalanithi

Paul Kalanithi Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Paul Kalanithi on Wise Famous Quotes.

In taking up another's cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.

Neurosurgery requires a commitment to one's own excellence and a commitment to another's identity. The

How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable?

Suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another.

Maybe, in the absence of any certainty, we should just assume that we're going to live a long time. Maybe that's the only way forward.

there's that study that says doctors do a worse job prognosticating for patients they're personally invested in.

If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably.

When there is no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.

Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job --- not a calling.

You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture - and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.

Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn't be, and whose shouldn't be requires an unattainable prognostic ability.

If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?

This was summer at Sierra Camp, perhaps no different from

Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.

Nobody has it coming.

How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients.

The MRI shows a mass in your brain, which is causing your symptoms." Silence. "Do you want to see the MRI?" "Yes." I

The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement.

mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world

Out of his pen he was spinning gold.

Mortal duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back.

all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time.

Always the seer is a sayer," Emerson wrote. "Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.

The mind was simply the operation of the brain.

At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living.

Looking out over the expanse ahead I saw not an empty wasteland but something simpler: a blank page on which I would go on.

The truth that you live one day at a time didn't help: What was I supposed to do with that day?

Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive, and fierce a career as you can find, full of the temptation to find easy paths

Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect?

The decision to operate at all involves an appraisal of one's own abilities, as well as a deep sense of who the patient is and what she holds dear.

tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful.

Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too.

Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.

I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: "I can't go on. I'll go on.

The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But

Even in having children in this new life, death played its part.

As a doctor, you have a sense of what it's like to be sick, but until you've gone through it yourself, you don't really know.

But my focus would have to be on my imminent role, intimately involved with the when and how of death - the grave digger with the forceps. Not

Few books I had read so directly and wholly addressed that fundamental fact of existence: all organisms, whether goldfish or grandchild, die.

Neurosurgery seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity, and death.

Some days, I simply persist.

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing

I could either study meaning or I could experience it. After

A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful. Only a few patients demanded the whole at once; most needed time to digest.

I was making the decision to do this work because this work, to me, was a sacred thing.) Lucy

What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.

Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber, respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor.

What kind of life exists without language?

What are you most afraid or sad about?" she asked me one night as we were lying in bed.

"Leaving you," I told her.

I had traversed the line from doctor to patient, from actor to acted upon, from subject to direct object.

It's very easy to be number one; find the guy who is number one, and score one point higher than he does.

my imagined future and my personal identity collapsed, and I faced the same existential quandaries my patients faced.

The root of disaster means a star coming apart.

Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.

Words have a longevity I do not.

Frail but never weak.

values of Christianity - sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness - because

The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live. -

Do you think my life has meaning? Did I make the right choices?

It's not fair - I've been diluting my drinks with water." A

And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.

Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases.

the heroic spirit of responsibility amid blood and failure. This struck me as the true image of a doctor.

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

In fourteenth-century philosophy, the word patient simply meant "the object of an action,

(Alexander Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.")

Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So