Wise Words by Others

Random quotes about illness:

"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

"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

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

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

"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 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

"Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey." ~Marcel Proust

"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

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

"An imaginary ailment is worse than a disease."  ~Yiddish Proverb


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

"When an illness knocks you on your ass, you should stay and relax for a while before trying to get back up."  ~Terri Guillemets 

"The most important thing in illness is never to lose heart."  ~Nikolai Lenin