Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
—Susan Sontag, 1963Quotes
If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.
—George W. Bush, 2005Everyone who is sick is someone else’s patient zero.
—Leslie Jamison, 2020Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.
—Samuel Johnson, 1750All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.
—Jack London, 1912Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.
—Anton Chekhov, 1904What timid man does not avoid contact with the sick, fearing lest he contract a disease so near?
—Ovid, c. 10How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object.
—Charles Lamb, 1833I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.
—Richard Krause, 1982Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the scarcity of effective remedies.
—Bian Qiao, c. 500 BCI 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