Health Quotes

And thus the literary man has two fires in his body: the strain of his mental work and the overmuch of blood in his head.... Man, so rich in knowledge, has also become rich in diseases, but poor in health and physical strength. - Sebastian Kneipp, Thus Shalt Thou Live: Hints and Advice for the Healthy and the Sick on a Simple and Rational Mode of Life and a Natural Method of Cure, 1889, translated from the 19th German edition


The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind. - G.K. Chesterton


There's lots of people in this world who spend so much time watching their health that they haven't the time to enjoy it. - Josh Billings


The greatest wealth is health. - Virgil


I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.  - Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 1903


Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.  - Doug Larson


Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.  - World Health Organization, 1948


The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience.  Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around.... Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.  - Larry Dossey


Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.  - Author Unknown


Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.  - Redd Foxx


As a people, we have become obsessed with Health.  There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this.  We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying.  We have lost all confidence in the human body.  - Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979


In order to change we must be sick and tired of being sick and tired.  - Author Unknown


A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ.  - John Steinbeck


The best six doctors anywhere
And no one can deny it
Are sunshine, water, rest, and air
Exercise and diet.
These six will gladly you attend
If only you are willing
Your mind they'll ease
Your will they'll mend
And charge you not a shilling.
- Nursery rhyme quoted by Wayne Fields, What the River Knows, 1990


He who takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skill of his doctors.  - Chinese Proverb


If I'd known I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself.  - Leon Eldred


Be careful about reading health books.  You may die of a misprint.  - Mark Twain


Poor health is not caused by something you don't have; it's caused by disturbing something that you already have. Healthy is not something that you need to get, it's something you have already if you don't disturb it. - Dean Ornish


Red meat is not bad for you.  Now blue-green meat, that's bad for you!  - Tommy Smothers


They claim red meat is bad for you.  But I never saw a sick-looking tiger.  - Chi Chi Rodriguez


Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life; some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something.  - Lord Chesterfield


If the pain wanders, do not waste your time with doctors.  - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The... patient should be made to understand that he or she must take charge of his own life.  Don't take your body to the doctor as if he were a repair shop.  - Quentin Regestein


I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.  - Author Unknown


Joy and Temperance and Repose
Slam the door on the doctor's nose.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


If I had my way I'd make health catching instead of disease.  - Robert Ingersoll


Diseases come a horsebacke, and returne on foot. - French proverb quoted by Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, 1611 ('Maladie')


Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.  - George Jean Nathan


Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.  - Cicero


If you have health, you probably will be happy, and if you have health and happiness, you have all the wealth you need, even if it is not all you want.  - Elbert Hubbard


People who are always taking care of their health are like misers who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.  - Laurence Sterne


To feel keenly the poetry of a morning's roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness.  - Henri Frederic Amiel


The longer I live the less confidence I have in drugs and the greater is my confidence in the regulation and administration of diet and regimen.  - John Redman Coxe, 1800


A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book.  - Irish Proverb


Despise no new accident in your body, but ask opinion of it.... There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man's observation, what he finds good and of what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health. - Francis Bacon


Fresh air impoverishes the doctor.  - Danish Proverb


There are two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth.  Some evils admit of consolations, but there are no comforters for dyspepsia and the toothache.  - Henry Lytton Bulwer


Water, air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia.  - Napoleon I


The I in illness is isolation, and the crucial letters in wellness are we.  - Author unknown, as quoted in Mimi Guarneri, The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing


In minds crammed with thoughts, organs clogged with toxins, and bodies stiffened with neglect, there is just no space for anything else.  - Alison Rose Levy, "An Ancient Cure for Modern Life," Yoga Journal, Jan/Feb 2002


Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once. - Thomas Browne


When it comes to eating right and exercising, there is no "I'll start tomorrow." Tomorrow is disease. - Terri Guillemets


What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease. - George Dennison Prentice, Prenticeana, 1860




Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey. - Marcel Proust


My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass. - Terri Guillemets


We drink one another's health and spoil our own. - Jerome K. Jerome


In a disordered mind, as in a disordered body, soundness of health is impossible.  - Cicero


I think you might dispense with half your doctors if you would only consult Dr. Sun more.  - Henry Ward Beecher


Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit.  When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open.  - B.K.S. Iyengar


Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.  - Charles Simmons


Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us now knowing this truth. We are at our best when they give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work. - Albert Schweitzer


If one's bowels move, one is happy; and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it. - Lin Yutang (1895–1976)


Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world. - Gwendolyn Brooks


Your prayer must be for a healthy mind in a sound body.
Ask for a brave soul that has no fear of death,
deems length of life the least of nature's gifts
and is able to bear any kind of sufferings,
knows neither wrath nor desire and believes
the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than
the loves and feasts and downy cushions of Sardanapalus.
Reveal what you are able to give yourself;
the only path to a life of tranquility lies through virtue.
- Juvenal, translated from Latin {“orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano...”}


What man is happy? He who has a healthy body, a resourceful mind, and a docile nature. - Thales of Miletus, translated from Greek


[I]t seems as if pain were the prayer of the nerve for healthy blood. - Moritz Heinrich Romberg, A Manual of the Nervous Diseases of Man, 1840, translated from German by Edward H. Sieveking





The appearance of a disease is swift as an arrow; its disappearance slow, like a thread.  - Chinese Proverb


Nature does require
Her time of preservation, which perforce
I her frail son amongst my brethren mortal
Must give my attendance to.
- William Shakespeare


Health is not valued until sickness comes. - Thomas Fuller


Health is like munny, we never have a true idea of its value until we lose it.  - Josh Billings


Adam and Eve ate the first vitamins, including the package.  - E.R. Squibb


Our body is a machine for living.  It is organized for that, it is its nature.  Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.  - Leo Tolstoy


It has often been remarked, that persons destitute of ambition and avarice are peculiarly likely to enjoy long life. They feel no regret for the past, nor anxiety about the future. Enjoying that tranquility of soul, on which the happiness of our early years so much depends, they are strangers to those torments of the mind, which usually accompany more advanced years, and by which the body is wasted and consumed. Hence a calm, contented, and cheerful disposition, may be justly considered the great source of health, in regard both of body and mind; and ought to be accounted the most important of all our possessions. - John Sinclair, The Code of Health and Longevity, 1807


Gold that buys health can never be ill spent.  - Thomas Dekker, Westward Ho, 1604


Disease is somatic; the suffering from it, psychic. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Health of body and mind is a great blessing, if we can bear it.  - John Henry Cardinal Newman


With every pill we have prescribed for us we should also be given a creative prayer, a suggested way to correct our destructive patterns of thought. - Ernest Holmes, "Health Is Normal"


Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, rivel them up like old apples, make them as so many Anatomies. - Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy


In later times wise men were never wanting who endeavoured to restore among their contemporaries primitive habits and ways of living, to bring mankind back to the observance of those simple and rational rules of life to which the ancients owed their health and strength. - Sebastian Kneipp, 1889, translated from German, introduction to Thus Shalt Thou Live  [Kneipp (1821–1897) was a pioneer in naturopathic medicine and was known for his strong beliefs in "water cures" a.k.a. hydrotherapy. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


Sometimes I get the feeling the aspirin companies are sponsoring my headaches. - Terri Guillemets


Life is like a tree and its root is consciousness. Therefore, once we tend the root, the tree as a whole will be healthy. - Deepak Chopra


A healthy body is the guest-chamber of the soul; a sick, its prison.  - Francis Bacon


An imaginary ailment is worse than a disease.  - Yiddish Proverb


Health is a large word.  It embraces not the body only, but the mind and spirit as well;... and not today's pain or pleasure alone, but the whole being and outlook of a man.  - James H. West


He who can believe himself well, will be well. - Ovid


The root of all health is in the brain. The trunk of it is in emotion. The branches and leaves are the body. The flower of health blooms when all parts work together. - Kurdish Saying


Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady.  - François Duc de la Rochefoucauld


From the bitterness of disease man learns the sweetness of health.  - Catalan Proverb


If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.  - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.  - Meryl Streep


Just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy.  - Author Unknown


Every man's disease is his personal property.  - Alonzo Clark


Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene
Supports the mind supports the body too.
- John Armstrong


Anybody's soap is superior to somebody else's stink killer. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures. - Robert Benchley, "Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat," No Poems: or around the world backwards and sideways, 1932


Stretching oneself too thin is the disease of modern life — letting oneself get too thick, the other. - Terri Guillemets


Physick, for the most part, is nothing else but the Substitute of Exercise or Temperance. - Joseph Addison


If you desire healing,
let yourself fall ill,
let yourself fall ill.
- Rumi


A bad cold wouldn't be so annoying if it weren't for the advice of our friends.  - Kin Hubbard


Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.  - Aldous Huxley


The most important thing in illness is never to lose heart.  - Nikolai Lenin


Beauty isn't something on the outside. It's your insides that count! You gotta eat green stuff to make sure you're pretty on the inside. - Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo video game) written by Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka, and Toshihiro Kawabata


The message that underlies healing is simple yet radical: We are already whole.... Underneath our fears and worries, unaffected by the many layers of our conditioning and actions, is a peaceful core. The work of healing is peeling away the barriers of fear that keep us unaware of our true nature of love, peace, and rich interconnection with the web of life. Healing is the rediscovery of who we are and who we have always been. - Joan Borysenko


The part can never be well unless the whole is well.  - Plato


The cure of the part should not be attempted without the cure of the whole. - Plato


Illnesses which occur because of physical causes should be treated by doctors with medical remedies; those which are due to spiritual causes disappear through spiritual means. Thus an illness caused by affliction, fear, nervous impressions, will be healed more effectively by spiritual rather than physical treatment. Hence, both kinds of treatment should be followed; they are not contradictory. - 'Abdu'l-Bahá


The scientific truth may be put quite briefly; eat moderately, having an ordinary mixed diet, and don't worry.  - Robert Hutchison, 1932


It is part of the cure to want to be cured. - Seneca


I am at the moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose, green in the gills, damp in the eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold.  - Charles Dickens


If by gaining knowledge we destroy our health, we labour for a thing that will be useless in our hands.  - John Locke


To avoid sickness eat less; to prolong life worry less.  - Chu Hui Weng


It is a wise mans part, rather to avoid sickness, than to wishe for medicines. - Thomas More, Utopia


What health is to the body, even that is honesty to the soul. Develop your spirit that it may gain strength to control the body and follow the natural laws of nutrition and hygiene. - Kemetic Wisdom


When the head aches, all the body is the worse.  - English Proverb


When you are in a melancholy fit, first suspect the body... a little bit of gristle sticking in the wrong place, an untimely consumption of custard, excessive gooseberries, often cover the mind with clouds and bring on the most distressing views of human life.
I start up at two o'clock in the morning, after my first sleep, in an agony of terror, and feel all the weight of life upon my soul.... But stop, thou child of sorrow... and tell me on what you dined. Was not there soup and salmon, and then a plate of beef, and then duck, blanc-mange, cream cheese, diluted with beer, claret, champagne, hock, tea, coffee, and noyeau? And after all this, you talk of the mind and the evils of life! These kind of cases do not need meditation, but magnesia.
- Sydney Smith, "A Little Moral Advice: A Fragment on the Cultivation and Improvement of the Animal Spirits"


Against diseases here the strongest fence
Is the defensive vertue, abstinence.
- Robert Herrick, "Abstinence"


Humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three-quarters lives their doctor. - Author Unknown


I tell you honestly what I think is the cause of the complicated maladies of the human race: it is their gormandizing and stuffing, and stimulating their digestive organs to an excess, thereby producing nervous disorders and irritation. - John Abernethy (1764–1831)


Food-addiction, or food-drunkenness, is an old story in Hygienic literature. This is the first mention I have seen of it in "regular" medical literature. I fear to hope that its recognition spells progress. - Herbert M. Shelton, Getting Well


Although they can be very healthy I believe the current focus on gluten-free lifestyles is a little misplaced. I see an awful lot of people who would benefit much more from a glutton-free lifestyle. - Wordplay genius and all-around great guy, Tim Irwin, 2012


Healing is freedom from worry.
Healing is to live and not to pretend to live.
Healing is gratitude.
Healing is balance.
Healing is letting go.
Healing is the energy of now.
- Terri Guillemets


The cause is within us. The cure is within us. When we know this our concept of disease is no longer that of something fixed upon the body cells which must be purged, cut or burned away. It is not something coming in from the outside which we cannot prevent. Rather it is a change from within, and we must find the reason why the body changes its perfect pattern to vibrate to discord rather than to harmony. - Rebecca Beard, 1951


The doctor of the future will give no medicines, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the causes and prevention of disease. - Thomas Edison


Healthy people are invalids who don't know it.  - Jules Romains, Dr. Knock, 1923


The surest road to health, say what they will,
Is never to suppose we shall be ill.
Most of those evils we poor mortals know
From doctors and imagination flow.
- Charles Churchill


I suspect that we are all recipients of cosmic love notes. Messages, omens, voices, cries, revelations, and appeals are homogenized into each day's events. If only we knew how to listen, to read the signs. - Sam Keen


When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly.  - Friedrich Nietzsche


Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. - Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923


[N]o maxim is more true, than that cheerfulness of mind and serenity of spirit, is highly essential to the vigorous enjoyment of health. [A] fretful and irritable disposition... tends to weaken the body, induce a train of nervous complaints, and finally, loads the body with disorders, which possibly it may be beyond the power of medicine to restore to its native vigour. This is no imaginary or improbable result, for so united and dependant is the body, on the state of the mind, that when the one is under any excitement, the other is as assuredly likely to be affected... - T.N., "On Cheerfulness as Conducive to Health," in The Medical Adviser, and Guide to Health and Long Life, edited by Alex. Burnett, M.D., 1824 July 24th  #stress  #dontworry  #behappy


Life has been reduced to getting food out of cans. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of disease.  - Edward Jenner


Did God who gave us flowers and trees,
Also provide the allergies?
- Yip Harburg, "A Nose Is a Nose Is a Nose," 1965


There is something in sickness that breaks down the pride of manhood.  - Charles Dickens


People with diseases like AIDS and cancer feel an urgency in straightening out their lives, examining their purpose, and confronting the reality of death. Ironically, in spite of the physical and emotional pain they experience, many of these patients express gratitude for this opportunity. The encounter with their own mortality changes their priorities in life, their values and aspirations. For many, it makes them truly cherish life and the ability to give and receive love. - Jeff Seibert


Everyone should be his own physician. We ought to assist and not force nature. Eat with moderation what agrees with your constitution. Nothing is good for the body but what we can digest. What medicine can produce digestion? Exercise. What will recruit strength? Sleep. What will alleviate incurable ills? Patience. - Voltaire


Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease. - Hippocrates


I am convinced that unconditional love is the most powerful known stimulant of the immune system. If I told patients to raise their blood levels of immune globulins or killer T cells, no one would know how. But if I can teach them to love themselves and others fully, the same changes happen automatically. The truth is: love heals. - Bernie Siegel


You can learn to follow the inner self, the inner physician that tells you where to go. Healing is simply attempting to do more of those things that bring joy and fewer of those things that bring pain. - O. Carl Simonton


You are as important to your health as it is to you. - Terri Guillemets


My definition of fitness is to be able to carry out all of the activities in life that you desire, plus have a physical reserve at the end of the day to do something besides lie down and flip the remote. If you can do all that, if you're functional, then you're fit. It doesn't matter if you have great abs or can bench-press your body weight. Those things have nothing to do with real life. - James Glinn, physical therapist, in an interview with Joe Kita for his 1999 book Wisdom of Our Fathers


Every day we touch what is wrong, and, as a result, we are becoming less and less healthy. That is why we have to learn to practice touching what is not wrong—inside us and around us. When we get in touch with our eyes, our heart, our liver, our breathing, and our non-toothache and really enjoy them, we see that the conditions for peace and happiness are already present. - Thich Nhat Hanh


The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturæ—the most healing power of nature—are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating. - René Dubos


Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own Affairs than we. - Michel de Montaigne, "Of Experience," translated from French by Charles Cotton


The physician who teaches people to sustain their health is the superior physician. The physician who waits to treat people until after their health is lost is considered to be inferior. This is like waiting until one's family is starving to begin to plant seeds in the garden. - Author unknown, similar to statement in The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine


Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind. - Thomas Wolfe


Bacteria keep us from heaven and put us there. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other.  - Joseph Addison


For happy health, fuel yourself with dreams and greens. - Terri Guillemets


It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.... We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father—a noble, pious man. - Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), 1889


It is a lot harder to keep people well than it is to just get them over a sickness.  - DeForest Clinton Jarvis


The healthiest among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical, athletic, and long-lived is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he would have been had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity. In the most perfect specimen of civilized man, something is still found wanting by the physiological critic. Can a return to nature, then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking root in the silence of innumerable ages? — Indubitably not. All that I contend for is, that from the moment of relinquishing all unnatural habits, no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to hereditary maladies gradually perishes for want of its accustomed supply. - William Andrus Alcott (1798–1859), Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages, 1838


I have come to understand that some of the deepest and most effective healing is not found at a doctor's office or a hospital, but rather from inside ourselves. Our bodies are designed for self-healing, and we are capable of both boosting and blocking that ability. - Dr. Daju Suzanne Friedman, Heal Yourself with Qigong


Life is not merely to be alive, but to be well.  - Marcus Valerius Martial


There are some remedies worse than the disease.  - Publilius Syrus


Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses.  - Jean Baptiste Molière, Le Malade Imaginaire


The mind has great influence over the body, and maladies often have their origin there.  - Jean Baptiste Molière


To be always considering "what we should eat, and what we should drink, and wherewithal we should be clothed," in order to avoid the approach of disease, is the most likely means of provoking its attack. A man who is continually feeling his pulse, is never likely to have a good one. If he swallow his food from the same motive as he does his physic, it will neither be enjoyed nor digested so well as if he ate in obedience to the dictates of an uncalculating appetite. The hypochondriac who is in the habit of weighing his meals, will generally find that they lay heavy on his stomach. If he take a walk or ride, with no other view than to pick up health, he will seldom meet it on the road. - John Reid, M.D., "Occupation," c.1818


Illness tells us what we are. - Italian Saying


To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear. - Stephen Levine


The marvelous pharmacy that was designed by nature and placed into our being by the universal architect produces most of the medicines we need. - Norman Cousins


Health... is not so much a state, but a force: the power to resist and overcome threats to one's well-being. - Gregory P. Fields


Healing comes when the individual remembers his or her identity—the purpose chosen in the world of ancestral wisdom—and reconnects with that world of Spirit. - Malidoma Patrice Somé


Confidence and hope do more good than physic.  - Galen


If you let go of the things you're addicted to, your pains will let go of you. - Terri Guillemets


Live in rooms full of light
Avoid heavy food
Be moderate in the drinking of wine
Take massage, baths, exercise, and gymnastics
Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water
Change surroundings and take long journeys
Strictly avoid frightening ideas
Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements
Listen to music.
- A. Cornelius Celsus


The miracle of self-healing occurs when the inner patient yields to the inner physician. - Vernon Howard, 1967


Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.  Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.  - Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1977


Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit. - William Saroyan


Half the modern drugs could well be thrown out the window, except that the birds might eat them. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself!  - Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia


Our illness is often our healing.  - Mooji


The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space, and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity. - Boris Pasternak


The existence of illness in the body may no doubt be called a shadow of the true illness which is held by man in his mind. - Hazrat Khan


A single, dancing thread ties the people of the world together in a cohesive fabric. This is our humanness and mortality. We are all born with a similar challenge, borne from the blessing of ownership of this complex physical body.... With this ownership... comes the sometimes immense responsibility of health maintenance. - Garri Garripoli, Qigong: Essence of the Healing Dance


Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.  - Denis Diderot


Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live.  But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.  - Ralph Waldo Emerson


Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, "Inspiration"


If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.  - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Over the Teacups, 1891


After these two, Dr. Diet and Dr. Quiet, Dr. Merriman is requisite to preserve health. - James Howell


But with this it is as in other things: what is simple, rational, consonent with nature, is abandoned, and a cure is sought where it cannot be found, in means injurious, because contrary to nature. It may be said without much exaggeration: the greater the absurdity of a new-fangled mode of healing is, the more swells the number of its friends and adherents until the over-credulous crowds come to realise the fact that they have been deceived by unscrupulous, money-making quacks....
The same may be said, and with more reason still, of the modern way of living. When we consider the habits of certain people and the blunders they make in the physical training of their children, it would almost seem as if they had lost all common sense and the power of logical thinking.
- Sebastian Kneipp, 1889, translated from German, introduction to Thus Shalt Thou Live


Illness is the result of imbalance. Imbalance is a result of forgetting who you are. Forgetting who you are creates thoughts and actions that lead to an unhealthy lifestyle and eventually to illness.... Illness can thus be understood as a lesson you have given yourself to help you remember who you are. - Barbara Brennan


The greatest leverage for healing is found at the subtlest levels of function. - Rudolph Ballentine


The majority of people of this country, are ever studying the best means of preserving health, and at the same time pursue a course that must have results precisely contrary to their wishes. They will seek for medicines with the utmost avidity, and will fill their carcases with patent medicines and the nostrums of the regular quack, in order to cure some disorder having existence only in their weak imaginations; and when by dint of perseverance, they have travelled through the pharmacopæia, purged, blistered, and bled profusely from the pocket, they find the disease, or rather the imaginary disease, just as it was previous to their course of medicine. - "Physic; Or, I Die," The Medical Adviser, and Guide to Health and Long Life, edited by Alex. Burnett, M.D., 1824 August 21st  #bigpharma


First need in the reform of hospital management? That's easy! The death of all dietitians, and the resurrection of a French chef. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Sugar is a type of bodily fuel, yes, but your body runs about as well on it as a car would. - Terri Guillemets


There were lymph glands that might do him in.... There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell.... There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as he and Hungry Joe did. Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about. - Joseph Heller, Catch‑22, 1961


In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities hypochondria has always seemed to me to be the only rational position to take on life. - John Diamond, C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too, 1998


Health and disease don't just happen to us. They are active processes issuing from inner harmony or disharmony, profoundly affected by our states of consciousness, our ability or inability to flow with experience. This recognition carries with it implicit responsibility and opportunity. - Marilyn Ferguson


He who has health has hope; and he who has hope has everything.  - Arabic Proverb


A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.  - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


To live without love, compassion, or any other spiritual value creates a state of such severe imbalance that every cell yearns to correct it. Ultimately, that is what lies behind the onset of disease; the body is sending a message that something lacking in the present—an imbalance existing somewhere—has given rise to highly visible, unarguable, physical symptoms. - Deepak Chopra


Happiness lies, first of all, in health.  - George William Curtis, Lotus-Eating


Having passed the threshold of my subject, I shall remark that, however partial I may be to simplicity of treatment, I am decidedly opposed to the common notion of following nature as a general rule. Many persons, seriously determined to preserve their health at any sacrifice of enjoyment, have failed in their efforts by ill-judged attempts in that way. "Nature is the best guide."—"Follow Nature, and you cannot err."—"Nature always directs the best."—These are the leading maxims, but when pursued too far, without discrimination, they are extremely fallacious and injudicious. We should recollect that a civilised and a savage state are materially different; and that, what will answer in one may not in another. Successive generations, in improved society, alter, not only our constitutions, but our very features and persons. By carrying this crude notion of natural living too far, we find ourselves involved in the most ludicrous absurdities....
This zealous desire to follow Nature can never be pursued with consistency, in as much as we do not know what a state of Nature is. Man has seldom, if ever, been found in what we might call a truly primitive state.... The indigenous productions of his country... generally regulate or point out his diet. Thus, climate makes a great difference in the important article of food, and the customs of each savage nation differ materially one from another. Where then are those favourite rules of Nature to be found? Are we to eat human flesh, to go naked, tattoo our faces, sleep in caverns?...
In short an attempt to shape our living to that which is designated a natural state, is equally absurd as not to eat any thing requiring chewing, in order to save the teeth. But, perhaps, the best argument of all is, that notwithstanding our numerous temptations to injure the health, and the many maladies we have created, unknown to savage nations, the duration of life seems pretty nearly balanced in one state and the other—indeed I think we have generally the advantage in point of longevity.
- Hortator, "Precautions in Following 'Nature's Dictates,'" Simplicity of Health, 1829


If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer.  - Clement Freud, The Observer, 27 December 1964


Healing comes only from that which leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglements with ego.... - Carl Jung


Sickness and suffering are not meant for man,
For Spirit is perfect and right;
But we transgress God's laws in many a way
And, so, turn away from the light.
There is not any need to suffer such pain,
For God did not make all these ills;
He wanted us happy and free to enjoy
The valleys, the ocean, the hills!
Thinking correctly can help keep us all well!
Right thinking can keep us immune
From much that is wrong, and can help every one
Keep, harmoniously, in tune!
And so that, dearest friends, is the reason why
Man suffers from all kinds of ills:
Some day he may learn the correct laws of God;
And, then, he can give up his pills!
- Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, "How to Keep Well" (1940s)


[L]ongevity in itself is not a basis for evolutionary selection — natural selection is not interested in us after we have finished child-bearing. - Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman, Seasons of Life: The Biological Rhythms that Enable Living Things to Thrive and Survive, 2009


If you start to think about your physical or moral condition, you usually find that you are sick. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Proverbs in Prose


When an illness knocks you on your ass, you should stay and relax for a while before trying to get back up. - Terri Guillemets


A great many sick persons are allowed to drift into a critical condition when ill—from which many never rally, because they are not fed—not furnished with such nutritive material as their enfeebled powers can digest. - King Chambers, quoted by John Milner Fothergill in A Manual of Dietetics, 1886


If you do everything you should do, and do not do anything you should not do, you will, according to the best available statistics, live exactly eighteen hours longer than you would otherwise. - Logan Clendening


The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not. - Mark Twain


Health is a relationship between you and your body. - Terri Guillemets


The great secret of medicine, known to doctors but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves. - Lewis Thomas


Being healthy is a revolutionary act. - Author Unknown


I see rejection in my skin, worry in my cancers, bitterness and hate in my aching joints. I failed to take care of my mind, and so my body now goes to hospital. - Astrid Alauda


It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like. - Jackie Mason


Sometimes a headache is all in your head. Relax. - Terri Guillemets


Health is merely the slowest way someone can die.  - Author Unknown


May you live as long as you are fit to live, but no longer! or, may you rather die before you cease to be fit to live than after!  - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1749


Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself. - Sydney J. Harris


My excess fat scares me — it's a ticking time bomb to my body. - Carrie Latet, 2006


I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward. - John Mortimer


Personal healing on all levels—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—comes when we get in touch with our disowned energies.... Through integrating all aspects of ourselves, we become whole. - Shakti Gawain


Hear your heart. Heart your health. - Terri Guillemets


In our busy 21st century life the one commodity that seems to be going extinct is time and we forget that healing takes time. - Dr. Frank Lipman


So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health.  - A.J. Reb Materi, Our Family


If the physician comes from a far land and speaks in a strange and unintelligible language, the common people think him clever, gather around him, and seek his advice. The physician does not work the cure. He does but prepare and clear the path for nature, the real healer.... If you can carry out your treatment effectively with diet or with healing foods, then do not use drugs, for most of them are enemies and antagonists of nature, especially the purgatives.... Do not despise any cure of which you hear, for often results may be achieved by simple means which you could not accomplish with a multiplicity of prescriptions and medicines.... Reassure and encourage the patient with the prospect of recovery, even if you are not sure of it, for thus you will strengthen his nature. - Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, translated, quoted in A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History by Bernard Lewis, 2000


A healthy body and soul come from an unencumbered mind and body. - Terri Guillemets


Our Creator has given us five senses to help us survive threats from the external world, and a sixth sense, our healing system, to help us survive internal threats. - Bernie Siegel


I've shackled myself with the prison bars of ill health. - Terri Guillemets


Nothing is more fatal to Health, than an over Care of it.  - Benjamin Franklin


One thing is certain: the time will come when the opinions of priests and doctors must give way to the science of life; for their opinions lead to death and misery, and the science of life is health and happiness. - Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, March 1861


Human misery universally arises from some error that man admits as true. We confound our fears with the idea feared, and place the evil in the thing seen or believed. Here is a great error, for we never see what we are afraid of. - Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, 1861


Now, I stand alone on this rock, fighting the errors of this world, and establish the science of life by my works. What is my mode of warfare? With the axe of truth I strike at the root of every tree of error and hew it down, so that there shall not be one error in man showing itself in the form of disease. - Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, March 1861


Every one is made of matter, and matter is continually going through a chemical change. This change is life, not wisdom, but life, like vegetable or mineral life. Every idea is matter, so of course it contains life in the name of something that can be changed. Motion, or change, is life. Ideas have life. A belief has life, or matter; for it can be changed. Now, all the aforesaid make up man; and all this can be changed. - Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, 1861


After I found that mind was matter, I found that ideas were matter condensed into a solid called disease, and that this, like a book, contained all the wisdom of its author. Seeing the book,—for sight with Wisdom embraces all the senses,—I open it, and see through it. To the patient it is a sealed book; but to Wisdom there is nothing hid which cannot be revealed or seen, nor so far off that it cannot be reached. So I read the contents of the book to the patient, and show that it is false. Then, as the truth changes his mind, light takes the place of the darkness, till he sees through the error of disease. The light of Wisdom dissipates the matter, or disease, the patient once more finds himself freed of opinions, and happiness is restored. - Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, August 1861


Disease is the misery of our belief, happiness is the health of our wisdom, so that man's happiness or misery depends on himself. Now, as our misery comes from our belief, and not from the thing believed, it is necessary to be on the watch, so as not to be deceived by false guides. Sensation contains no intelligence or belief, but is a mere disturbance of the matter, called agitation, which produces mind, and is ready to receive the seed of error. Ever since man was created, there has been an element called error which has been busy inventing answers for every sensation. - Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, September 1861


Man is made of opinions,—of truth and error; and his life is a warfare like all other lives before him.... Man goes on developing error upon error till he is buried in his own belief.... It is the office of wisdom to explain the phenomena in man called disease, to show how it is made, and how it can be unmade. This is as much a science as it is to know how to decompose a piece of metal. - Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, December 1861


It may seem strange to those in health that our beliefs affect us. The fact is, there is nothing of us but belief. It is the whole capital and stock in trade of man. It is all that can be changed, and embraces everything man has made or ever will make. - Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, 1865


If you don't take care of yourself, the undertaker will overtake that responsibility for you. - Terri Guillemets


Without discipline in spiritual pursuits, the central nervous system doesn't have a chance to adjust and grow with the increased demand. It would be like putting a high voltage into a small bulb—it is bound to explode. - Swami Sivananda Radha


The stars swirl downward from the blissful heavens, energy of the universe heals around me, exploding into life, drifting into calmness, and nothing else matters. - Terri Guillemets


Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life. - Buddha


Some day when you have time, look into the business of prayer, amulets, baths and poultices and discover for yourself how much valuable therapy the profession has cast out of the window. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)