I have often wondered and even laughed at those who fancied that everything had been so consummately and absolutely investigated by an Aristotle or a Galen or some other mighty name, that nothing could by any possibility be added to their knowledge.

The heart is the household divinity which, discharging its function, nourishes, cherishes, quickens the whole body, and is indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action.

As art is a habit with reference to things to be done, so is science a habit in respect to things to be known.

Moderate labor of the body conduces to the preservation of health, and cares many initial diseases.

When in many dissections, carried out as opportunity offered upon living animals, I first addressed my mind to seeing how I could discover the function and offices of the heart's movement in animals through the use of my own eyes instead of through the books and writings of others, I kept finding the matter so truly hard and beset with difficulties that I all but thought, with Fracastoro, that the heart's movement had been understood by God alone.

Nature is a volume of which God is the author.

I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.