A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.
Interpretation
A wise doctor provides better care and instills confidence in patients by avoiding nonsensical remarks.
This quote by Marcel Proust emphasizes the importance of wisdom and thoughtful communication in healthcare. By suggesting that a doctor who refrains from making foolish statements is effectively empowering their patients, Proust highlights how the credibility and perception of a medical professional can significantly influence patient outcomes and trust in medical advice.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of effective communication in medicine.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
Stress says that the things we are involved in are important enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace toward others, or our tight grip of control.
Why are you doing this to yourself? When something bad happens, why do you have to pick at it until it bleeds all over again?
One should never make one's entrance with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
Not to be able to bear poverty is a shameful thing, but not to know how to chase it away by work is a more shameful thing yet.
It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found.
It gets tiresome being spoken to as if you are a child, even if you happen to be one.
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