Quotes by Sherwin B. Nuland

About Sherwin B. Nuland:

Sherwin Bernard Nuland was an American surgeon and writer who taught bioethics, history of medicine, and medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, and occasionally bioethics and history of medicine at Yale College. His 1994 book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter was a New York Times Best Seller and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.

Sherwin B. Nuland

Hope can still exist even when rescue is impossible.

Sherwin B. Nuland

Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force

Sherwin B. Nuland

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy ...

Sherwin B. Nuland

Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned s...

Sherwin B. Nuland

Cancer cells are fixed at an age where they are still too young to have learned the rules of the society in which they live. As with so many immature individuals of all living kinds, everything they do is excessive and uncoordinated with the needs or...

Sherwin B. Nuland

Too many of the elderly do not have the family or the communal attachments necessary to feel valued; too many are widowed or otherwise alone; too many live in surroundings where they are essentially without the companionship necessary to stimulate a ...

Sherwin B. Nuland

By the time of my ninth birthday, I had become a bit of a socialist, as I am said by conservative colleagues to be to this day. I went on within the next few years to volunteer as an envelope stuffer for the American Labor Party, and my political thi...

Sherwin B. Nuland

Both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do.

Sherwin B. Nuland

Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal with those aspects that frighten us the most. It is by knowing the truth... that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death.

Sherwin B. Nuland

The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science

Sherwin B. Nuland

That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me -- actually more exciting -- than such...

Sherwin B. Nuland

The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.

Sherwin B. Nuland

Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients...

Sherwin B. Nuland

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.

Sherwin B. Nuland

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

Sherwin B. Nuland

Though moral axioms to guide the conduct of the practitioner have existed since the beginnings of the profession of healing, Western doctors are most likely to view the Hippocratic Oath of approximately two-and-a-half millennia ago as the first codif...

Sherwin B. Nuland

The Scientific Revolution, that remarkable transformation of European thought that occurred between approximately 1550 and 1700, brought with it an ascendancy of the experimental method and the refusal to believe any explanation of natural phenomena ...

Sherwin B. Nuland

Do you know what the world will be saved by? I'll tell you. It'll be saved by the human spirit. And by the human spirit, I don't mean anything divine, I don't mean anything supernatural - certainly not coming from this skeptic.

Sherwin B. Nuland

I have not seen much dignity in the process by which we die. The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail.

Sherwin B. Nuland

Author Bio

  • NameSherwin B. Nuland
  • DescriptionAmerican surgeon
  • BornDecember 8, 1930
  • DiedMarch 3, 2014
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionSurgeon; Writer
  • AwardsNational Book Award