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

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

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.