“I saw my friends in medical school seeming to be more engaged with the...” — Harold E. Varmus Quote

I saw my friends in medical school seeming to be more engaged with the real world. That provoked a sort of jealousy, and I decided to go to medical school after all.

When high school students ask to spend their afternoons and weekends in my laboratory, I am amazed: I didn't develop that kind of enthusiasm for science until I was 28 years old.

Science can improve lives in ways that are elegant in design and moving in practice.

I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

When I go to see theater, I'm consumed with professional jealousy.

To talk about balance, it's easier to talk about what's out of balance. And I think anytime that you have any disease, and disease meaning lack of ease, lack of flow... dis-ease. So any time there's disease, you're out of balance, whether it's jealousy, anger, greed, anxiety, fear.

There is no greater glory than love, nor any greater punishment than jealousy.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.