Quotes by Neurosurgeons

Our culture is obsessed with youth because we have lost the ancient knowledge that growth never stops. We are not transient, momentary mistakes inthe cosmos- evolutionary curiosities that rise like mayflies, swarm for a day, and are gone. We are players who are here to stay, and the universe was built with us in mind. We reflect it, with our deepest loves and loftiest aspirations, just as it reflects us.

There is no job more important than parenting. This I believe.

If you want to be relevant only in your household, then you only need to know the things that are important in your house, and if you want to be relevant in your neighborhood, you need to know what's important in your neighborhood. The same thing applies to your city, state, and country. And if you want to be relevant to the entire world, program that computer known as your brain with all kinds of information from everywhere in order to prepare yourself.

Sometimes I struggled to say something meaningful only to learn that silence is just as powerful as words.

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

Do your best and let God do the rest.

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

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.

It's not what you know but the kind of job you do that makes the difference.

The wheel of life: one generation rises like summer wheat, then withers and falls to seed. The wheel turns - birth, youth, adulthood, parenthood, senescence, death - driven by genetic machinery set in motion so many eons ago. For all its subtleties and infinite beauty, life has but one purpose: to keep the wheel turning.

My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the Universe itself and all the beings withing it are ultimately goind.

Hearing my story seemed to give him a license he had been longing for someone to give him: the license to believe what he had seen with his own eyes--to KNOW that deep and comforting truth: that our eternal spiritual self is more real than anything we perceive in this physical realm, and has a divine connection to the infinite love of the Creator.

I came to realize that if people could make me angry they could could control me. Why should I give someone else such power over my life?

About eighty percent of the food on shelves of supermarkets today didn't exist 100 years ago.

If you're good, you'll be recognized. Because people, even if they're prejudiced, are going to want the best. You just have to make being the best your goal in life.

Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.

Adult obesity and overweight statistics have increased by about 50 percent since the Dietary Goals were announced. [by the federal government, in 1977] That bears repeating: a 50 percent increase in obesity/overweight correlated with a 10 percent decrease in fat content in the diet.

Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers – tulips, lilies, carnations – to find the heads eaten by deer. It’s just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The earth is quickly turned over by worms, the processes of nature marching on, reminding me of what Paul saw and what I now carry deep in my bones, too: the inextricability of life and death, and the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this, because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.