Health

Quotes about Health:

Sourced

Alphabetized by author

• 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.
  
  • Anonymous nursery rhyme set to the tune of "Yankee Doodle", quoted in "The Health Club" in School Life, Vol. IV (January - June 1920), p. 17

• 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, in "Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat" in No Poems: or Around the World Backwards and Sideways (1932)

• 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, in The Way of All Flesh (1903)

• Thank Him for health. Consecrate it as His trust to innocent enjoyment, manly effort, social usefulness, and preparation for an honorable and holy career.
  • William Ellery Channing, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 299.

• Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux.
  • Day by day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.
    • Émile Coué, in his auto-suggestive formula for health, as quoted in The Practice of Autosuggestion by the Method of Emile Coué (1922) by Cyrus Harry Brooks
  • Variant translation: Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.

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

• 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 (1819)

• Christ's gospel could never have been delivered by one who was diseased.
  • John McClellan Holmes, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 299.

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

• How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself!
  • Charles Lamb, in Last Essays of Elia (1833)

• 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, in "An Ancient Cure for Modern Life" in Yoga Journal (January - February 2002)

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

• Healthy people are invalids who don't know it.
  • Jules Romains, in Dr. Knock (1923)

• 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)

• 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, in The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

Unsourced

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

• A cough is a symptom, not a disease. Take it to your doctor and he can give you something serious to worry about.
  • Robert Morley

• A cripple of the worst sort, and consumptive into the bargain.
  • Alan Bennett

• A filling is a dentist's food supplement.
  • Leonard S. Wisdon

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

• I have a headache, my tummy feels hurty, I feel sick, quite frankly it'd be less trouble if I just had cancer.
  • Alex Mallett, ex-Black Reverence drummer.

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

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

• A man's health can be judged by which he takes two at a time ... pills or stairs.
  • Joan Welsh

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

• Bacteria keeps us from heaven and puts us there.
  • Martin H. Fischer

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

• Disease is somatic; the suffering from it, psychic.
  • Martin H. Fischer

• 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

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

• Doctors cure Nature’s mistakes with mistakes of their own.
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov

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

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

• 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

• Fresh air impoverishes the doctor.
  • Danish Proverb

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

• Good health makes the worst weather to be the loveliest.
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov

• Half the modern drugs could well be thrown out the window, except that the birds might eat them.
  • Martin H. Fischer

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

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

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

• Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other.
  • Joseph Addison

• 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

• 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)

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

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

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

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

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

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

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

• 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.
  • Logain Clendening

• 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 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

• 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

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

• 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

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

• Nothing is more fatal to health than an overcare of it.
  • Benjamin Franklin

• Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
  • Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

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

• Sickness can be a healthy reaction to an unhealthy way of life.
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov

• Sickness comes on horseback, but goes away on foot.
  • William C. Hazlitt

• 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

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

• 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

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

• The greatest wealth is health.
  • Virgil

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
  • Mark Twain

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

• 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

• Water, air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte

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

• “Health is what my friends are always drinking to before they fall down.”
  • Phyllis Diller