Quotes & Sayings About Siddhartha

When someone is searching," said Siddhartha, "then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don't see, which are directly in front of your eyes. — Hermann Hesse

Children with cancer, as one surgeon noted, were typically "tucked in the farthest recesses of the hospital wards." They were on their deathbeds anyway, the pediatricians argued; wouldn't it be kinder and gentler, some insisted, to just "let them die in peace"? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? Exchanges — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Doctors treat diseases, but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Truly, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts as this I, this riddle, the fact I am alive, that I am separated and isolated from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And about nothing in the world do I know less about than me, about Siddhartha! — Hermann Hesse

Yes Siddhartha,' he said. 'Is this what you mean: that the river is in all places at once, at its source and where it flows into the sea, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the ocean, in the mountains, everywhere at once, so for the river there is only the present moment and not the shadow of the future?'
'It is,' Siddhartha said.'And once I learned this I considered my life, and it too was a river, and the boy Siddhartha was separated from the man Siddhartha and the graybeard Siddhartha only by shadows, not by real things ... Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has being and presence. — Hermann Hesse

My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer - any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Hodgkin had just returned from his second visit to Paris, where he had learned to prepare and dissect cadaveric specimens. He was promptly recruited to collect specimens for Guy's new museum. The job's most inventive academic perk, perhaps, was his new title: the Curator of the Museum and the Inspector of the Dead. Hodgkin — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In China, lung cancer is already a leading cause of death attributable to smoking in men. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Some cancers are curable, while others are highly incurable. The spectrum is enormous. Metastatic pancreatic cancer is a highly incurable disease, whereas some leukemia forms are very curable. There is a big difference between one form and another. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. - William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950 — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Gliomas appeared on the same side of the brain that the phone was predominantly held, further tightening the link. An avalanche of panic ensued in the media. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood. — Hermann Hesse

Soot is a mixture of chemicals that would eventually be found to contain several carcinogens. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha. — Hermann Hesse

He sat thus, lost in meditation, thinking Om, his soul as the arrow directed at Brahman. — Hermann Hesse

I'm human, we all are - all doctors are - and grieving is a natural part of medicine. As a doctor, grieving is a natural part of medicine. If you deny that, again, you'd get into this trap of curing and victory. I think grief is very important. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

A major hindrance to cancer effort has been a chronic, severe shortage of funds - a situation that is not generally recognized. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It was, I suspected, not the first time that a patient had consoled a doctor about the ineffectuality of his discipline. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In 1788, the Chimney Sweepers Act was passed in Parliament, preventing master sweeps from employing children under eight (children over eight were allowed to be apprenticed). — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Scientists divide. We discriminate. It is the inevitable occupational hazard of our profession that we must break the world into its constituent parts -- genes, atoms, bytes -- before making it whole again. We know of no other mechanism to understand the world: to create the sum of its parts, we must begin by dividing it into the parts of the sum. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect. — Hermann Hesse

Kamala did not try to find him. She was not surprised when she learned that Siddhartha had disappeared. — Hermann Hesse

A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal. — Hermann Hesse

The men got off and started to unload their equipment. Most carried AK-47 or Pakistani G-3 rifles. The luggage consisted of ammunition boxes, radio sets and the feared RPG rocket launchers. The Heckler & Koch G-3s had been captured in a firefight from the Pakistani Frontier Corps last month. A tall man with a military bearing walked over and joined the Tajik officer. — Siddhartha Thorat

The realization of what wisdom actually was slowly blossomed and ripened in Siddhartha - and he discovered what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. Slowly this blossomed in him, was reflected back at him from Vasudeva's old, childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, unity. — Hermann Hesse

Sandeep Jauhar's Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem - so movingly told - that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The father touched Siddhartha's shoulder. 'You will go into the forest,' he said, 'and become a Samana. If you find bliss in the forest, come back and teach it to me. If you find disillusionment, come back, and we shall again offer sacrifices to the gods together. Now go.. — Hermann Hesse

Cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside and beyond itself; it subsumes all living. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

A Pap smear would give a woman a chance to receive preventive care [and] greatly decrease the likelihood of her ever developing cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Never a cell biologist at heart, as a colleague recalled, he contaminated the cells, infected the cultures, and grew out balls of fungi in the petri dishes. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers," the study's authors wrote. "In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual's need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

He had heard a voice, a voice in his own heart, which had commanded him to seek rest under this tree, and he had neither preferred self-castigation, offerings, ablutions, nor prayer, neither food nor drink, neither sleep nor dream, he had obeyed the voice. To obey like this, not to an external command, only to the voice, to be ready like this, this was good, this was necessary, nothing else was necessary. — Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha considered his circumstances. Thinking did not come easily to him. He didn't really feel like it, but he forced himself. — Hermann Hesse

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It is not what you have," as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, "it is what you do with it. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

This was the tenth month of my "fellowship" in oncology - a two-year immersive medical program to train cancer specialists - and I felt as if I had gravitated to my lowest point. In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt as if I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation - vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn't let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and which they think is effected by demons. Nothing is effected by demons, there are no demons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast. — Hermann Hesse

In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from a bathtub; the slippery equation balances itself.
But there is another moment of discovery - its antithesis - that is rarely recorded: the discovery of failure. It is a moment that a scientist often encounters alone. A patient's CT scan shows a relapsed lymphoma. A cell once killed by a drug begins to grow back. A child returns to the NCI with a headache. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

History repeats, but science reverberates. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Every era casts cancer in its own image. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Halsted's "cancer storehouse" grew far beyond its original walls at Hopkins. His ideas entered oncology, then permeated its vocabulary, then its psychology, its ethos, and its self-image. When radical surgery fell, an entire culture of surgery thus collapsed with it. The radical mastectomy is rarely, if ever, performed by surgeons today. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him. — Hermann Hesse

Oncologists and their patients are bound, it seems, by an intense subatomic force. So, albeit in a much smaller sense, this was a victory for me as well. I sat at Carla's table and watched her pour a glass of water for herself, unpurified and straight from the sink. She glowed radiantly, her eyes half-closed, as if the compressed autobiography of the last five years were flashing through a private and internal cinema screen. Her — Siddhartha Mukherjee

If something is good, more is not necessarily better. Not always. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

After having been standing by the gate of the garden for a long time, Siddhartha realised that his desire was foolish, which had made him go up to this place, that he could not help his son, that he was not allowed to cling him. Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine. — Hermann Hesse

Why did I write 'The Emperor of All Maladies?' A 56-year-old woman with an abdominal sarcoma, having undergone two remissions and a relapse, asked me to describe what she was battling. By the time I had finished answering her, I realised that I had written 600 pages. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Min Chiu Li, the researcher who had been expelled from the institute for treating women with placental tumors with methotrexate long after their tumors had visibly disappeared. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In New York in the 1910s, William B. Coley, James Ewing, and Ernest Codman had treated bone sarcomas with a mixture of bacterial toxins - the so-called Coley's toxin. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck. — Roger Zelazny

Cancer changes your life," a patient wrote after her mastectomy. "It alters your habits. ... Everything becomes magnified. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Seeking nothing, emulating nothing, breathing gently, he moved in an atmosphere of imperishable calm, impresihable light, inviolable peace. — Hermann Hesse

When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. — Hermann Hesse

The word metastasis, used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another, is a curious mix of meta and stasis - "beyond stillness" in Latin - an — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Is there something I can do to kill the cancer germ? Can the rooms be fumigated ... ? Should I give up my lease and move out? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Those who have not been trained in chemistry201 or medicine may not realize how difficult the problem of cancer treatment really is. It is almost - not quite, but almost - as hard as finding some agent that will dissolve away the left ear, say, and leave the right ear unharmed. So slight is the difference between the cancer cell and its normal ancestor. - William Woglom Life — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha. He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time. — Hermann Hesse

The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close." I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country - to see them so very close, clambering back. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Most of the selected essays share a common thread: They describe how science happens. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

This isolation was key to Farber's early success. Insulated from the spotlights of public scrutiny, he worked on a small, obscure piece of the puzzle. Leukemia was an orphan disease, abandoned by internists, who had no drugs to offer for it, and by surgeons, who could not possibly operate on blood. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the art of love," she said thoughtfully, "you are the best I've ever seen. You are stronger than others, more agile, more willing. Well have you learned my art, Siddhartha. Some day, when I am older, I wish to bear your child. And yet all this time, beloved, you have remained a Samana. Even now you do not love me; you love no one. Is it not so?" "It may be so," Siddhartha said wearily. "I am like you. You, too, do not love - how else could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people of our sort are incapable of love. The child people can love; that is their secret. — Hermann Hesse

We don't know why, but pancreatic cancer has a very interesting physiological link to depression. There seems to be a deep link, and we don't know what it is. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Out of this moment when the world melted away all around him, when he stood alone like a star in the sky, out of this moment of cold and despair, Siddhartha emerged, more himself than before, firmer in his resolve. — Hermann Hesse

There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Specificity refers to the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host. Killing a cancer cell in a test tube is not a particularly difficult task: the chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that, even in infinitesimal quantities, can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes. The trouble lies in finding a selective poison - a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient. Systemic therapy without specificity is an indiscriminate bomb. For an anticancer poison to become a useful drug, Meyer knew, it needed to be a fantastically nimble knife: sharp enough to kill cancer yet selective enough to spare the patient. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. ... — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or "willingness to yield to authority," was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as "assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention." Other — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Low fiber, red meat rich diets increase the risks of colon cancer, and obesity is linked to breast cancer, but much more about these links remain unknown, especially in molecular terms. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant - what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs - and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think you would have to be a nihilist to say that we are not making progress on cancer, just like you'd have to be hubristically optimistic to say that we have conquered cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

We may have to learn to live with cancer rather than die of it. It means a big change in our mindset and how we do research. We haven't quite reached there yet. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The result, as the journalist Elizabeth Drew noted in the Atlantic Monthly, was "an unabashed act to protect private industry from government regulation." Politicians were far more protective of the narrow interests of tobacco than of the broad interest of public health. Tobacco makers need not have bothered inventing protective filters, Drew wrote drily: Congress had turned out to be "the best filter yet. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer has enormous diversity and behaves differently: it's highly mutable, the evolutionary principles are very complicated and often its capacity to be constantly mystifying comes as a big challenge. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It felt - nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos - that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

in BRCA-1 has a 50 to 80 percent chance of developing breast cancer in her lifetime (the gene also increases the risk for ovarian cancer), about three to five times the normal risk. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

When words are both true and kind, they can change the world. — Gautama Buddha

If we didn't kill the tumor, we killed the patient. - William Moloney on the early days of chemotherapy — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing. - Voltaire — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the beauty of countless danseuse in my palace, I saw an endless suffering in the form of distorted and diseased figures as the absolute certainty towards which they were heading even as insects unwittingly consign themselves to the blazing flame. — Ajit Kumar Jha

I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases, and chemical reactions - frenulum, otitis, glycolysis - was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge. — Siddhartha Mukherjee