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Paul Kalanithi Quotes

Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.

Paul Kalanithi

Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.

Tags: cadavers, dissection, dissonance, doctors, health, medical students, medicine

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst wit...

Paul Kalanithi

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst wit...

Tags: doctors, health, mortality, patients

About Author
Paul Sudhir Arul Kalanithi (April 1, 1977 – March 9, 2015) was an American neurosurgeon and writer. His book When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir about his life and illness with stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House in January 2016. It was on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list for multiple weeks.

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

Paul Kalanithi

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

Tags: thinking

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

Paul Kalanithi

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

Tags: excellence, failure

Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?""Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

Paul Kalanithi

Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?""Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

Tags: memoir

As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives -- everyone dies eventually -- but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.

Paul Kalanithi

As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives -- everyone dies eventually -- but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.

Tags: death, doctor, illness, understanding

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't "feel guilty all the time." Maybe it is more along thes...

Paul Kalanithi

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't "feel guilty all the time." Maybe it is more along thes...

Tags: guilt, justice, mercy, religion, sin

People react differently to hearing 'Procedure X has a 70 percent chance of survival' and 'Procedure Y has a 30 percent chance of death.' Phrased that way, people flock to Procedure X, even though the...

Paul Kalanithi

People react differently to hearing 'Procedure X has a 70 percent chance of survival' and 'Procedure Y has a 30 percent chance of death.' Phrased that way, people flock to Procedure X, even though the...

Tags: death, survival, people

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.

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.

Tags: world, relationships, human

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.

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.

Tags: authenticity, her, find

Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the...

Paul Kalanithi

Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the...

Tags: life, nature, science

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, th...

Paul Kalanithi

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, th...

It was a five-hundred-page novel called Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven. I took it home and read it in a day. It wasn’t high culture. It sho...

Paul Kalanithi

It was a five-hundred-page novel called Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven. I took it home and read it in a day. It wasn’t high culture. It sho...

Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven.

Paul Kalanithi

Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven.