To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

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.

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

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

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

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.