Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the scarcity of effective remedies.

—Bian Qiao, c. 500 BC

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

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

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

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960

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

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

It is strange indeed that the more we learn about how to build health, the less healthy Americans become.

—Adelle Davis, 1951

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

The sick man is the parasite of society.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889

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

—Susan Sontag, 1963

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

—Muhammad, c. 630

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

—Ovid, c. 10

Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.

—Richard Krause, 1982

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

—Helen Keller, 1936

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

—Agnes Repplier, 1929

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

—Thomas Mann, 1924

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

—Jack London, 1912

Hygienic law, like martial law, supersedes rights in crises.

—Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1913

The best quarantine is hygiene.

—Richard D. Arnold, 1871

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

—Cotton Mather, 1693

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

—Guy R. Williams, 1975

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

—Leslie Jamison, 2020

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

—Jacme d’Agramont, 1348

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

—David Riesman, 1937

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

—Samuel Johnson, 1750

Health can make money, but money cannot make health.

—Maria Edgeworth, 1833

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

—Robert P. Hudson, 1983

Disease is not of the body but of the place.

—Latin proverb

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

—Anton Chekhov, 1904

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

—Charles Lamb, 1833

If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.

—George W. Bush, 2005

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

—Jewel Plummer Cobb, 1989

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

—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845

The beginning of health lies in knowing the disease.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615

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

—William Shakespeare, c. 1600

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

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

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

—Marianne Moore, 1935