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

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

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

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

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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.

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