Archive

Quotes

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

—Ovid, c. 10

The beginning of health lies in knowing the disease.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615

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

—Marianne Moore, 1935

The best quarantine is hygiene.

—Richard D. Arnold, 1871

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

—Thomas Mann, 1924

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

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

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

—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845

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

—Robert P. Hudson, 1983

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

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960

’Tis a portentous sign / When a man sweats and at the same time shivers.

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

Death from the bubonic plague is rated, with crucifixion, among the nastiest human experiences of all.

—Guy R. Williams, 1975

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

—Charles Lamb, 1833

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

—Samuel Butler, c. 1902