This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Virtue is to the soul what health is to the body." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"We should manage our fortune as we do our health - enjoy it when good, be patient when it is bad, and never apply violent remedies except in an extreme necessity." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Wisdom is to the soul what health is to the body." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"If you can be well without health, you can be happy without virtue." - Edmund Burke
"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, a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intemperate diet." - Edmund Burke
"I have no sympathy with the old idea that children owe such immense gratitude to their parents that they can never fulfill their obligations to them. I think the obligation is all on the other side. Parents can never do too much for their children to repay them for the injustice of having brought them into the world, unless they have insured them high moral and intellectual gifts, fine physical health, and enough money and education to render life something more than one careless struggle for necessaries." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"We are usually the best men when in the worst health" - English Proverbs
"The bloom of human life is morality; whatever else we may possess, health and wealth, power, grace, knowledge, have a value only as they lead up to this, have a meaning only as they make this possible." - Felix Adler
"Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering - an image of death." - François Rabelais
"Happiness is more a state of health than of wealth." - Frank Tyger
"Who lacks health lacks everything." - French Proverbs
"All foreign wisdom doth amount to this, to take all that is given, whether wealth, or love, or language; nothing comes amiss: a good digestion turneth all to health." - George Herbert
"When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost!" - German Proverbs
"Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; days of joy, but not peace and happiness." - Henrik Ibsen, aka Henrik Johan Ibsen
"These motions everywhere in nature must surely be the circulations of God. The flowing sail, the running stream, the waving tree, the roving wind – whence else their infinite health and freedom? I can see nothing so proper and holy as unrelaxed play and frolic in this bower God has built for us." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear; and there is damnation in the things that wicked men love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what winds are to oceans and malarial regions, which waft away the elements of disease, and bring new elements of health. And where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women suffer arise from a morbid state of health." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality." - Herbert Spencer
"Vigorous health and its accompanying high spirits are larger elements of happiness than any other things whatever." - Herbert Spencer
"One may derive information from the regimen of persons in good health what things are proper; for if it appear that there is a great difference whether the diet be so and so, in other respects, but more especially in the changes, how can it be otherwise in diseases, and more especially in the acute? But it is well ascertained that even a faulty diet of food and drink steadily persevered in, is safer in the main as regards health than if one suddenly change to another." - Hippocrates, fully known as Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos NULL
"All our possessions are as nothing compared to health, strength, and a clear conscience." - Hosea Ballou
"Most want the wealth of this country to be used for human needs--health, work, schools, children, decent housing, a clean environment--rather than for billion-dollar nuclear submarines and four billion-dollar aircraft carriers." - Howard Zinn
"Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty? I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for his or her country might act on behalf of a different vision. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights." - Howard Zinn
"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." - James Bryant Conant
"Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought... The people who live in fear of disease are the people who get it... Change of diet will not help a man who will not change his thoughts. When a man makes his thoughts pure, he no longer desires impure food... Clean thoughts make clean habits." -
"The health of a community, is an almost unfailing index of its morals." - James Martineau
"Sleep, riches, and health - to be truly enjoyed, must be interrupted." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"One can recover from loss of wealth, and even loss of health, but never the loss of honor." - John A. Marshall, fully John Aloysius Marshall
"What is required to participate more fully in our own health and well-being is simply to listen more carefully and to trust what we hear, to trust the messages from our own life, from our own body and mind and feelings." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us, and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us without." - Joseph Addison
"Cheerfulness is, in the first place, the best promoter of health. Repining and secret murmurs of heart give imperceptible strokes to those delicate fibres of which the vital parts are composed." - Joseph Addison
"Health and cheerfulness mutually beget each other." - Joseph Addison
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated; by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed." - Joseph Addison
"Virtue is the health of the soul. It gives a flavor to the smallest leaves of life." - Joseph Joubert
"When a man loses his health, then he first begins to take good care of it." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Money-giving is a good criterion of a person's mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally ill people." - Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
"Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"The good life is not only good for one's conscience; it is good for art, good for knowledge, good for health, good for fellowship." - Lewis Mumford
"We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health and longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival." - Lewis Thomas
"Art should be a satire and a warning against our paralyzed emotions, our devitalized thinking and our denaturalized living. It teaches us unsophistication in a sophisticated world. It should restore to us health and sanity caused by too much mental activity. It should sharpen our senses, re-establish the connection between our reason and our human nature, and assemble the ruined parts of a dislocated life again into a whole, by restoring our original nature." - Lin Yutang
"Life is growth - a challenge of environment. If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction, then this splendid balance of cosmic forces which we call life is on the road toward misfortune, misery and destruction. Therefore, health is the most precious of all things." - Luther Burbank
"Mental health is an ongoing dedication to reality at all costs." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"A person who eats sweet food to gratify his desires even though the food will be dangerous to his health is equal to an animal. This is not the behavior of an intelligent person." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Personal health is preserved by learning about one’s own constitution, by finding out what is good or bad for oneself, by continual self-control in eating habits and comforts (but just to the extent needed for self-preservation), by forgoing sensual pleasures, and lastly, by the professional skill of those to whose science these matters belong." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Just because a child’s parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education, proper nutrition. Clearly we ignore the needs of black children, poor children, and handicapped children in the country." - Marian Wright Edelman
"Depression, achievement, and physical health are three of the most obvious applications of learned optimism. But there is also the potential for a new understanding of yourself." - Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
"Riches are the pettiest and least worthy gifts which God can give a man. What are they; to God’s word? Yea, to bodily gifts, such as beauty and health, or to the gifts of the mind such as understanding, skill, wisdom? Yet men toil for them day and night and take no rest. Therefore our Lord God commonly gives riches to foolish people to whom He gives nothing else." - Martin Luther
"There are tens of millions of Americans who are beyond the welfare state. Taken as a whole there is a culture of poverty... bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress. Twenty per cent of a nation, some 32,000,000." - Michael Harrington, fully Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington
"The teacher is like the farmer or the physician. The farmer doesn’t produce the grains of the field; he merely helps them grow. The physician does not produce the health of the body; he merely helps the body maintain its health or regain its health. And the teacher does not produce knowledge in the mind; he merely helps the mind discover it for itself." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler