Great Throughts Treasury

"I have become convinced that there is a definite relationship between medical science and religious faith and that God has given us both as weapons against disease." - Robert C. Peale

"All disease is brain disease... Only when the immune system is viewed as a world system will disease be reduced." - Paul Pearsall

"When a man dies, he does not just die of the disease he has: he dies of his whole life." -

"That disease is most serious which proceeds from the head." - Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL

"There are some remedies worse than the disease." - Publius Syrus

"We're too disease-conscious. We read that one out of three dies of this, one out of five dies of that. We should accept the fact that one out of one dies of something - and get on with the business of living." -

"Old age is an incurable disease." -

"To set up what you like against what you dislike - this is the disease of the mind." -

"The greatest deficit in academic medicine is that it has generally failed to approach the problem of preventing disease or health promotion.... we are too busy taking care of people with disease to be bothered with preventing it." - Norm Shealy, fully Dr. C. Norman Shealy

"Doubt is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization - the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith that springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best." - Robert James Turnbull

"The body is a servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind. There is a mind/body connection that is powerful. As a healer, I am convinced disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought. Sick thoughts express themselves through a sickly body. Thoughts of fear can kill a man. People who live in fear of disease are most likely the very people who get the disease. Conversely, if you would improve your body, guard your mind." - Greta Woodrew, Pseud. for Greta Andron Smolowe

"Clearly, if disease is man-made, it can also be man-prevented. It should be the function of medicine to help people die young as late in life as possible." - Willem Ernst Wunder

"Everyone… has a feeling of inferiority. But the feeling of inferiority is not a disease; it is rather a stimulant to health, normal striving and development. It becomes a pathological condition only when the sense of inadequacy overwhelms the individual and, far from stimulating him to useful activity, makes him depressed and incapable of development." -

"The time we spend on earth is but one tick of the eternal clock in an unending eternity. We are here in mortality for a brief moment and then on to the next stage of our development. It does not matter how many trials we have in life, just how we handle them. It does not matter how long we live, just how we live. How can we appreciate eternal good health if we have never experienced sickness, pain, or disease? How can we appreciate eternal joy if we have never experienced disappointment, hardship, or failure? How can we appreciate living forever if we have never known death?" - Phil Batchelor

"There would be no place for hatred among wise men. For who but the foolish would hate good men? And there is no cause to hate bad men. Vice is as a disease of the mind, just as feebleness shows ill-health to the body." -

"Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence." - Mourning Dove or Christal Quintasket, aka Mourning Dove Salish and Christine Quintasket NULL

"Man’s disease is loneliness; God’s is progress." - Charles Dyer

"Shame kills faster than disease." - Buchi Emecheta

"Fear of disease killed more men than disease itself." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

"[Reflecting on his terminal disease] When your expectations for life are reduced to zero, then everything becomes more meaningful." - Stephen Hawking

"What the world needs is a sense of ultimate embarrassment. Modern man has the power and the wealth to overcome poverty and disease, but he has no wisdom to overcome suspicion. We are guilty of misunderstanding the meaning of existence; we are guilty of distorting our goals and misrepresenting our souls. We are better than our assertions, more intricate, more profound than our theories maintain." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"Love of pleasure is the disease which makes men most despicable." - Longinus, fully Gaius Cassius Longinus NULL

"It is more important to know what kind of patient has the disease than what kind of disease the patient has." - William Osler, fully Sir William Osler

"The nearer any disease approaches to a crisis, the nearer it is to a cure. Danger and deliverance make their advances together, and it is only the last push that one or the other takes the lead." - Thomas Paine

"Treat the disease, not the symptom." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch

"When a man lies dying, he does not die from disease alone. He dies from his whole life." - Charles Pierre Péguy

"The Perfect Way is difficult only for those who pick and choose; do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart: if you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease... There is no need to seek Truth; only stop having views... The ultimate Truth about both Extremes is that they are One Emptiness." -

"It is found easier by the shortsighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen." -

"I personally have experienced the power of prayer to heal the most devastating disease of them all - the power of prayer to heal fear!" -

"Deal firmly, yet tenderly, with evil, as if it were a disease in your own person, and the people will entirely put away their faults." -

"[Neurosis] is the disease of a bad conscience." -

"The symptoms of disease are marked by purpose, and the purpose is beneficent. The processes of disease aim not at the destruction of life, but at the saving of it." - Frederick Treves, fully Sir Frederick Treves, 1st Baronet

"Full, rich and abounding health is the normal and the natural condition of life. Anything else is an abnormal condition, and abnormal conditions as a rule come through perversions. God never created sickness, suffering and disease; they are man’s own creations. They come through his violating laws under which he lives. So used are we to seeing them that we come gradually, if not to think of them as natural, then to look on them as a matter of course." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"In the degree, however, that you come into a vital realization of your oneness with the Infinite Spirit of Life, whence all life in individual form has come and is continually coming, and in the degree that through this realization you open yourself to its divine inflow, you set into operation forces that will sooner or later bring even the physical body into a state of abounding health and strength. For to realize that this Infinite Spirit of Life can from its very nature admit of no disease, and to realize that this, then, is the life in you, by realizing your oneness with it, you can so open yourself to its more abundant entrance that the diseased bodily conditions - effects - will respond to the influences of its all-perfect power, this either quickly or more tardily, depending entirely on yourself." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"Many will receive great help, and many will be entirely healed by a practice somewhat after the following nature: Wit a mind at peace, and with a heart going out in love to all, go into the quiet of your own interior self, holding the thought - I am one with the Infinite Spirit of Life, the life of my life. I then as spirit, I a spiritual being, can in my own real nature admit of no disease. I now open my body, in w2hich disease has obtained a foothold, I open it fully to the inflowing tide of this Infinite Life, and it now, even now, is pouring in and coursing through my body, and the healing process is going on. Realize this so fully that you begin to feel a quickening and a warming glow imparted by the life forces to the body. Believe the healing process is going on. Believe it, and hold continually to it. Many people greatly desire a certain thing but expect something else. They have greater faith in the power of evil than in the power of good, and hence they remain ill." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"No disease can enter into or take hold of our bodies unless it finds therein something corresponding to itself which makes it possible. And in the same way, no evil or undesirable condition of any kind can come into our lives unless there is already in them that which invites it and so makes it possible for it to come. the sooner we begin to look within ourselves for the cause of whatever comes to us, the better it will be, for so much sooner will we begin to make conditions within ourselves such that only good may enter." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"Duty becomes a disease with us; it drags us ever forward... This duty, this idea of duty is the midday summer sun which scorches the innermost soul of mankind... The only true duty is to be unattached and to work as free beings, to give up all work unto God." - Vivekananda, fully Sri or Swami Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta NULL

"What Socrates said is that the only real harm [in this life] is harm to the soul. You may lose all your money, or be paralyzed by disease, but that is nothing compared to the damage done - by yourself, to yourself - if you lead an unjust life. Conversely, there is no gain like that which a good man has from the practice of the virtues, and consequently no loss that he would reckon as harm except the loss of his virtue." - Myles Frederic Burnyeat

"He who has got rid of the disease "Tomorrow" has the possibility to attain what he is here for." -

"Life is an incurable disease." -

"Life is an incurable disease." - Abraham Cowley

"War is not an adventure. It is a disease." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The more doctors, the more disease; the more lawyers, the more crime; the more philosophers, the more folly; the more priests, the more sin." - Author Unknown NULL

"Select the lucky and avoid the unlucky. Ill-luck is generally the penalty of folly, and there is no disease so contagious." - Baltasar Gracián

"The disease is often made worse by the remedy." - Baltasar Gracián

"I know no disease of the Soul, but Ignorance… Knowledge is the activity of the soul." - Ben Jonson

"Disease can be the spark or gift that allows many of us to live out our personal myths and become heroes." - Bernie S. Siegel

"It doesn't matter what the disease is. There is always room for hope. I'm not going to die because of statistics. I hope you won't either." - Bernie S. Siegel

"While there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world quite so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens

"No company is preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health." - Charles Caleb Colton