Archive

Quotes

I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

Everyone who is sick is someone else’s patient zero.

—Leslie Jamison, 2020

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

—Muhammad, c. 630

’Tis the destroyer, or the devil, that scatters plagues about the world.

—Cotton Mather, 1693

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

—Marianne Moore, 1935

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

—Thomas Mann, 1924

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

Disease is not of the body but of the place.

—Latin proverb

Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960

Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.

—Robert P. Hudson, 1983

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

—Agnes Repplier, 1929

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

—Susan Sontag, 1963

All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.

—Jack London, 1912