Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Health

"Avoid law suits beyond all things; they influence your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property." - Jean de La Bruyère

"Diseases are the penalties we pay for overindulgence, or for our neglect of the means of health... We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more, from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares. They fatigued only the muscles; we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"The golden age never leaves the world; it exists still, and shall exist, till love, health, and poetry, are no more - but only for the young." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities and the fountain of all our diseases. As a lamp is choked by a superabundance of oil, and a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intemperate diet." - Marion LeRoy Burton

"And all your dreams and other such like folly, to deep oblivion let them be consigned; for they arise but from your melancholy, by which your health is being undermined. A straw for all the meaning you can find in dreams! They aren’t worth a hill of beans, for no one knows what dreaming really means." - Geoffrey Chaucer

"For health and the constant enjoyment of life, give me a keen and ever present sense of humor; it is the next best thing to an abiding faith in providence." - George Barrell Cheever

"Digestion exists for health, and health exists for life, and life exists for the love of music or beautiful things." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"The trouble about 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, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements - the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself - are, in the environment, failures." - Barry Commoner

"Hope - of all ills that men endure, the only cheap and universal cure; the captive's freedom, and the sick man's health, the lover's victory, and the beggar's wealth." - Robert Crowley, also Robertus Croleus, Roberto Croleo, Robart Crowleye, Robarte Crole, and Crule

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

"Nutrition is a young subject; it has been kicked around like a puppy that cannot take care of itself. food faddists and crackpots have kicked it pretty cruelly... They seem to believe that unless food tastes like Socratic hemlock, it cannot build health. Frankly, I often wonder what such persons plan to do with good health in case they acquire it." - Daisie Adelle Davis

"Thousands upon thousands of persons have studied disease. Almost no one has studied health." - Daisie Adelle Davis

"You stop being happy as soon as you are conscious of wanting to be happy. Happiness, like health, must be unconscious." - Andre Bernard la Bovier de Fontenelle Étienne Fourmont

"Gold that buys health can never be ill-spent." - Thomas Dekker

"We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique." - John Dewey

"We never seem to know what anything means till we have lost it. The full significance of those words, property, ease, health - the wealth of meaning that lies in the fond epithets, parent, child friend, we never know till they are taken away; till in place of the bright, visible being, comes the awful and desolate shadow where nothing is - where we stretch our hands in vain, ands strain our eyes upon dark and dismal vacuity." - Orville Dewey

"Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind, nor can the material senses bear reliable testimony on the subject of health." - Mary Baker Eddy

"Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth." - Mary Baker Eddy

"Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are old, and some never grow so." - Tyron Edwards

"Bad books are like intoxicating drinks; they furnish neither nourishment, nor medicine. Both improperly excite; the one the mind; the other by body. The desire for each increases by being fed. Both ruin; one the intellect; the other the health; and together, the soul. The safeguard against each is the same - total abstinence from all that intoxicates either body or mind." - Tyron Edwards

"Duty performed is a moral tonic; if neglected, the tone and strength of both mind and heart are weakened, and the spiritual health undermined." - Tyron Edwards

"Temperance is to the body what religion is to the soul, the foundation and source of health and strength and peace." - Tyron Edwards

"It is a nationalism whose aim is not power but dignity and health. If we did not have to live among intolerant, narrow-minded and violent people, I should be the first to throw over all nationalism in favor of universal humanity." - Albert Einstein

"Love that has nothing but beauty to keep it in good health is short-lived." -

"Wine is the source of the greatest evils among communities. It causes diseases, quarrels, seditions, idleness, aversion to labor, and family disorders... It is s species of poison that causes madness. It does not make a man die, but it degrades him into a brute. Men may preserve their health and vigor without wine; with wine they run the risk of ruining their health and losing their morals." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

"Next to temperance, a quiet conscience, a cheerful mind, and active habits, I place early rising as a means of health and happiness." - Timothy Flint

"The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." -

"Nations like men, can be healthy and happy, though comparatively poor... Wealth is a means to an end, not the end itself. As a synonym for health and happiness, it has had a fair trial and failed dismally." - John Galsworthy

"Boys and girls should be taught to think first of others in material things; they should be infected with the wisdom to know that in making smooth the way lies the road to their own health and happiness." - John Galsworthy

"Negative thinking is depriving people of their natural birthright of health. It is the prime cause in shortening the lives of so many of us. And yet it is so simple to live a healthier, longer and so much happier life. We have only to recognize how God works His wonders through laws governing nature and "human nature."" - Walter M. Germain

"There is no separation between a patient’s neurobiology, spiritual life, life perspectives, and quality of life force. Words, and spiritual/therapeutic interventions can tangibly affect a patient’s neurochemistry and physical health just as assuredly as psycho-pharmacological drugs can tangibly affect a patient’s feelings and thoughts... I have found that working with the meaning of a patient’s illness can profoundly alter not only the prognosis but can influence and give meaning to all other aspects of a patient’s life. Depression, for example, is often a direct communication from the soul that one’s belief system is not working... It is all too easy, and part of the human condition, to be misled by our lower half into believing that the sensory world is all that’s real." - Brian Greer

"To have health of body, it is necessarie to have contentment of minde." - Stefano Guazzo

"I have never met a healthy person who worried much about his health, or a good person who worried much about his soul." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"Cheerfulness is health; the opposite, melancholy, is disease." - Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

"Take care of your health; you have no right to neglect it, and thus become a burden to yourself and perhaps others. Let you food be simple; never eat too much; take exercise enough; be systematic in all things; if unwell, starve yourself till you are well again, and you may throw care to the winds, and physic to the dogs." - William Hall

"It is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit." - William Dean Howells

"Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness." -

"A little rebellion now and then... is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." - Thomas Jefferson

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in the punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." - Thomas Jefferson

"Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly." -

"It is a common error, and the greater and more mischievous for being so common, to believe that repentance best becomes and most concerns dying men. Indeed, what is necessary every hour of our life is necessary in the hour of death too, as long as one lives he will have need of repentance, and therefore it is necessary in the hour of death too; but he who hath constantly exercised himself in it in his health and vigor, will do it with less pain in his sickness and weakness; and he who hath practiced it all his life, will do it with more ease and less perplexity in the hour of his death." -

"What we have today in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-cure system." - Ted Kennedy, fully Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy

"Being 'awake in your dreams' provides the opportunity for unique and compelling adventures rarely surpassed elsewhere in life... [As a skill] it has considerable potential for promoting personal growth and self-development, enhancing self-confidence, improving mental and physical health, facilitating creative problem-solving, and helping you to progress on the path to self-mastery." - Stephen LaBerge

"If we know as much about mental health as we do about physical health, an epidemic of hate would be considered as dangerous as an epidemic of typhoid." - David M. Levy

"If a man builds a better mousetrap than his neighbor, the world will not only beat a path to his door, it will make newsreels of him and his wife in beach pajamas, it will discuss his diet and his health, it will publish heart-throb stories of his love life." - Newman Levy

"Internal balance is health and internal unbalance is sickness." - Clarence Cook "C.C." Little, M.D.

"To insure good health: Eat lightly, breathe deeply, live moderately, cultivate cheerfulness, and maintain an interest in life." - William Londen

"Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system and profoundly affects the health. I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from doubt." - Charles Horace Mayo

"Anti-Semitism is a social disease. Anti-Semitism is an excellent diagnostic device to use in studying the health and well-being of society. For it is a harbinger of war, the fear of inadequacy that, in moments of crisis, breeds havoc and social panic." - Carey McWilliams