Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.