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.

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.

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

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

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.