Archive

Quotes

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

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

—Helen Keller, 1936

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

—Charles Lamb, 1833

Health care delivery is one of the tragedies still in America.

—Jewel Plummer Cobb, 1989

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

—Leslie Jamison, 2020

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

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

Diseases, at least many of them, are like human beings. They are born, they flourish, and they die.

—David Riesman, 1937

Disease is not of the body but of the place.

—Latin proverb

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

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

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

—Guy R. Williams, 1975

In times of pestilence, gaiety and joyousness are most profitable.

—Jacme d’Agramont, 1348

Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.

—Richard Krause, 1982