These scalpel quotes will inspire you. A scalpel, or lancet, or bistoury, is a small and extremely sharp bladed instrument used for surgery, anatomical dissection, podiatry, and various arts and crafts (called a hobby knife).
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging scalpel quotes, scalpel sayings, and scalpel proverbs.
Best Scalpel Quotes
- “You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “The truth is like a scalpel. The truth is painful.” ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz
- “Time heals. No, it doesn’t. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue is not a good thing. It is merely the wound’s other face.” ~ Karen Marie Moning
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“If you take the time to study how to be a doctor and how to use your scalpel and your medicine, then there are endless beings out there to help.” ~ Tenzin Palmo
- “Get a scalpel, and practice just, say, cutting a piece of meat or something like that. You sort of learn how you want to hold your fingers, and that sort of thing, and try to become graceful when you operate.” ~ Denton Cooley
- “If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you’re reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist’s dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.” ~ John McNally
- “I myself have always stood in the awe of the camera.
I recognize it for the instrument it is,
part Stradivarius, part scalpel.” ~ Irving Penn -
“Truth is to be used as a scalpel, not a club.” ~ Matt Chandler
- “A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.” ~ Michael Ondaatje
- “He had a sense of his dignity, which was of the most exquisite nature. He could detect a design upon it when nobody else had any perception of the fact. His life was made an agony by the number of fine scalpels that he felt to be incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.” ~ Vernor Vinge
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“An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.” ~ Nicolas Chamfort
- “I’ve never taken a scalpel to a dead body.” ~ Patricia Cornwell
- “Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.” ~ Maxwell Maltz
- “God is at the tip of our scalpels, our screwdrivers, our computer terminals, our dust rags, our vacuum cleaners, our pencils and pens. He is with us in our wheelchairs, or on our hospital beds, when all we can do is sit or lie flat. When we envision Him and His purpose in what we do, then we begin to grow aware of His presence in the middle of it. We are able to engage in our inward conversation with Him as we work, naturally, without strain. He becomes our partner, our collaborator.” ~ Sue Monk Kidd
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“The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.” ~ Ed Koch
- “[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)” ~ Stephen Batchelor
- “I could teach an eighth-grader in twenty minutes how to brief a case. Yet for all three years in most law schools the casebook method of learning the law is still in. The matriculating young lawyer is as qualified to represent a client with the education he has suffered through as a doctor who has never seen a patient, who has never held a scalpel in his hand and who learns surgery by having read text books about it and becomes skilled in surgery, if ever, after having stacked up piles of corpses who represent his pathetic learning process.” ~ Gerry Spence
- “Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.” ~ Hans Christian von Baeyer
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“The scalpel won’t make you happy.” ~ Demi Moore
- “I love the process of cutting everything out with a scalpel yourself: I don’t want to have my stencils drawn up in Illustrator, then laser-cut. I like the fact that it’s slightly wrong; I think it gives it a beauty. The individual and handmade will always be worth more than what a computer can do, at least until computers can learn how to make mistakes.” ~ Ben Eine
- “Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too – ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring earth.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
- “If you want to be a doctor, you may say, There are all these beings, they’re sick, they’re dying, I’ve got to go out and help them. And so you grab a bag full of scalpels and medicine and rush off. Even though your motivation is very pure, you end up harming beings because you don’t know what you’re doing.” ~ Tenzin Palmo
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“Listening to Benny [Goodman] talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel.” ~ Artie Shaw
- “So-called restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery. Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge.” ~ Alexander Eliot
- “Touching hands are not like pharmaceuticals or scalpels. They are like flashlights in a darkened room. The medicine they administer is self-awareness. And for many of our painful conditions, this is the aid that is most urgently needed.” ~ Deane Juhan
- “At first I was queasy; I’ll never forget the sound of the scalpel cutting a body open. But it was so cool trying to work out how these people died.” ~ Jonathan Davis
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“If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon’s.” ~ Austin O’Malley
- “Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don’t have to.” ~ Alice Weaver Flaherty , Surgeon scalpel quotes
- “You would have made a fine warrior, you know that?” I am one. Death is my enemy.” Yeah, it is, isn’t it.” God, it made such sense that he’d bonded with her. She was a fighter… like him. “Your scalpel’s your dagger.” Yup.” ~ J.R. Ward
- “It’s Major Ketchup in the bathroom with the laser scalpel.” “Hmm.” He sliced a delicately herbed spear of asparagus. “Obviously we were meant for each other as I can interpret that as you meaning something more like Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick.” ~ Nora Roberts
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“After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge.” ~ Richard Matheson
- “The railway was part scalpel, part movie camera, slicing the city open, parading its inner workings at fifty frames per second. It was on the S-Bahn that she felt least abandoned, as if the act of travelling turned back the clock, and brought her nearer to the future she had lost.” ~ Philip Sington
- “In golf, driving is a game of free-swinging muscle control, while putting is something like performing eye surgery and using a bread knife for a scalpel.” ~ Tommy Bolt
- “As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [chemistry]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem. For the further analysis of these phenomena which are in flux and flow, the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study.” ~ John Jacob Abel
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“Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.” ~ Alan Dershowitz
- “Yes, the deficit doctors have their scalpels out all right, but they’re not poised over the budget. That’s as fat as ever and getting fatter. What they’re ready to operate on is your wallet.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “Doctrine is to be the balm of a healing experience of God, not a theological scalpel to wound and exclude people.” ~ Diana Butler Bass
- “Self-disruption is akin to undergoing major surgery, but you are the one holding the scalpel.” ~ Jay Samit
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“Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser” ~ Michael Caine
- “Unfortunately, I have dedicated great effort to the task of compiling this ‘sensitive words glossary,’ and I have mastered my filtering skills. I knew which words and sentences had to be cut, and I accepted the cutting as if that was the way it should be. In fact, I will often take it on myself to save time and cut a few words. I call this ‘castrated writing’ – I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself before the surgeon raises his scalpel.” ~ Murong Xuecun
- “DOCTOR. Always preceded by ‘The good’. Among men, in familiar conversation, ‘Oh! balls, doctor!’ Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you’re no longer on terms. All are materialists: ‘you can’t probe for faith with a scalpel.'” ~ Gustave Flaubert
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“It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon.” ~ Robert Hooke
- “It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.” ~ Mary Roach
