Quotes from Mehmet Oz

When there is a psyche-disrupting event in your life, it can prevent you from getting the long blocks of sleep at night that are so important to healthy aging.

You need to be proactive, carve out time in your schedule, and take responsibility for being the healthiest person you can be - no one else is going to do it for you.

Medicine is a jealous mistress. It demands all your time.

If you can laugh your way through life, you can have a good time as you're going through the sometimes troubling time that we have in our lives.

You don't have a family doctor anymore like you did when you were a kid, who treated you throughout your life.

The rule I use is, If it doesn't come out of the ground looking the way it looks when you eat it, be careful.

Medicine grounds me, it centers me, that's why I continue to do it.

In my business, if I get too close to you and you die, it hurts me. And so you develop a natural inclination not to be close to the patient, so that if things don't work out ideally, you can still get up the next day and care for the next patient.

As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.

Most food you drop is still perfectly edible. If it was in your eyesight the whole time, you can pick it up and eat it.

We are spending most of our time in American health care fixing the mistakes that either we in the profession are causing or our patients are, without recognizing it, causing to themselves.

If I make your workplace conducive to walking at lunch, or working out at some time during the day, or I get people to use the stairs more by creating incentives to do such, then people will start doing it naturally.

My mother was all about unconditional love, and I don't think we give that to our patients a lot. At the end of the day, what they really need you to do is to look at them in the eye and say, 'I'm here for you. I'm going to make sure this works out.'

I get up at the same time every morning.

I've always felt that, when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn't say, 'Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open-heart operations.' I've probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000? He shook his head. It's just a different number on the tombstone.

The rule I use is, If it doesn't come out of the ground looking the way it looks when you eat it, be careful. There's no such thing as a PowerBar tree.

Food - I love nuts. I eat them all the time, they're easy to carry around, and I am never hungry all day long.

You cannot drive a system that's going to be aiming at preventing illness if everyone is not in it. The whole gaming of health insurance and health care in America is based on that fundamental principle: insure people who aren't sick and you don't have to pay more money on them.

I don't operate on smokers. I tell cigarette smokers that I can operate on you, I get paid the same. And you might even do well. But it's the wrong thing to do. So I refuse to operate on you until you stop smoking.

I saw many people who had advanced heart disease and I was so frustrated because I knew if they just knew how to do the right thing, simple lifestyle and diet steps, that the entire trajectory of their life and health would have been different.

Every hour you sit at work increases your mortality 11 percent. Think about that.

Make the driving force in your life love.

What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, 'I care about you. We can do this together.'

I get up in the morning and do a seven-minute yoga workout. I know the most likely time I'm going to do something is when I first get up, and I make it short because, like you, I don't really want to do that first thing in the morning.