Author

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

From Paul Kalanithi

The physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face - and make sense of - their own existence.

From Paul Kalanithi

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

From Paul Kalanithi

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own... the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

From Paul Kalanithi

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

From Paul Kalanithi

I knew medicine only by its absence - specifically, the absence of a father growing up: one who went to work before dawn and returned in the dark to a plate of reheated dinner.

From Paul Kalanithi

I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me.

From Paul Kalanithi

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing... You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.

From Paul Kalanithi

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete.

From Paul Kalanithi

The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient's eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon's diagnosis.

From Paul Kalanithi

Paul Kalanithi

Notable Quotes

Authors with Similar Views

James Nesbitt

Marcia Angell

Sam Kean

Helen Keller

Jack Kevorkian

Authors with Opposing Views

Atul Gawande

Alan Shepard

Alan Zweibel

Arthur Peacocke

Ashley Montagu