Archive

Quotes

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

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

Health can make money, but money cannot make health.

—Maria Edgeworth, 1833

Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.

—Richard Krause, 1982

If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.

—Anton Chekhov, 1904

Disease is not of the body but of the place.

—Latin proverb

We should always presume the disease to be curable until its own nature proves it otherwise.

—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845

Men take diseases, one of another. Therefore let men take heed of their company.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1600

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

—Cotton Mather, 1693

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

—Charles Lamb, 1833

Health in all lands is among the indispensable guarantees of human progress.

—Helen Keller, 1936

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

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960

What timid man does not avoid contact with the sick, fearing lest he contract a disease so near?

—Ovid, c. 10