Health Quotes and Sayings

Health Quotes

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

Sickness comes on horseback but departs on foot.  ~Dutch Proverb, sometimes attributed to William C. Hazlitt

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 ones bowels move, one is happy; and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it. ~Lin Yutang, 1937

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

Mens sana in corpore sano.  (Your prayer must be for a sound mind in a sound body.)  ~Juvenal

[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 hospitals and graveyards are filled with those who refused to acknowledge the virtues of physical morality.  ~Dr Ron Spallone, denverchiropractor.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 that would benefit much more from a glutton free lifestyle. ~Tim Irwin

Against diseases here the strongest fence

Is the defensive vertue, abstinence.

~Robert Herrick, "Abstinence"

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

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

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 keeps us from heaven and puts us there.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other.  ~Joseph Addison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities hypochondria has always seems to me to be the only rational position to take on life.  ~John Diamond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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