This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Taking medicine is often only making a new disease to cure or hide the old one." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The only things in which we can be said to have any property are our actions. Our thoughts may be bad, yet produce no poison; they may be good, yet produce no fruit. Our riches may be taken away by misfortune, our reputation by malice, our spirits by calamity, our health by disease, our friends by death. But our actions must follow us beyond the grave; with respect to them alone, we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world." - Charles Caleb Colton
"To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason." - C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
"Without concepts we find ourselves unbounded, undefined; and our greatest fear is to live without boundaries, without definitions. Of course, when we have no boundaries, we are vulnerable. Everyone, everything can come in. there are no separations, no barriers to protect us. That is why we put up personal boundaries, to protect ourselves from people, from things, from disease, from accidents, and ultimately from death. First we define ourselves: me versus you, me against not-me. Then we fortify the boundary, making the wall bigger and stronger. Pretty soon we have a really thick wall around ourselves. We are completely protected from the not-me." - Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi
"There is no part of you that is indefinable and changeless, that does not get lost or change with age, disease, or circumstances." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"You are what you are, not your disease, not what you do. Life is about being, not doing… But not until we discover who we truly are can we begin to celebrate our uniqueness." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives." - George Bernard Shaw
"Alcohol produces artificial happiness, artificial courage, artificial gaiety, artificial self-satisfaction, thus making life bearable for millions who would otherwise be unable to endure their condition. To them alcohol is a blessing. Unfortunately, as it acts by destroying conscience, self-control, and the normal functioning of the body, it produces crime, disease and degradation." - George Bernard Shaw
"And I know that there is nothing more pitiful than meeting the little bodies of those that get no further than their little selves, people who can't get away from the little "I," people who are afflicted with the "I disease," the worst of all the diseases." - George Washington Carver
"Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness - mysterious, universal, inevitable as death." - Harriet Martineau
"It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Conceit is the most incurable disease that is known to the human soul." - Henry Ward Beecher
"There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear; and there is damnation in the things that wicked men love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what winds are to oceans and malarial regions, which waft away the elements of disease, and bring new elements of health. And where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease." - Hippocrates, fully known as Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos NULL
"It is in sickness that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent upon one another for our comfort, and even necessities. Thus disease, opening our eyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing." - Hosea Ballou
"It is in sickness that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent one upon another for our comfort, an even necessities. Thus, disease, opening our dyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing." - Hosea Ballou
"Does the world need more medicine and energy and buildings and food? No. There is enough food and medicine, there are enough resources for all. There is starvation and poverty and widespread disease because of human ignorance, prejudice, and fear. Out of greed and hatred we hoard materials; we create wars over imaginary geographic boundaries and act as if one group of people is truly different from another group somewhere else on the planet." - Jack Kornfield
"No company is preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health." - James Bryant Conant
"Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought... The people who live in fear of disease are the people who get it... Change of diet will not help a man who will not change his thoughts. When a man makes his thoughts pure, he no longer desires impure food... Clean thoughts make clean habits." -
"Medical doctors strike me as ignorant as to how a healthy body works. They know how to control or repair some diseased bodies, but their medicine is often worse than the disease. And what about the pressure and competitiveness of the pharmaceutical industry and the make-profits-quick motives of the food corporations? Medical doctors put little or no emphasis on nutrition, exercise and energy balance. They are paid when we are sick, not when we are well." - Jerry Rubin
"I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease." - John Donne
"The jealous man’s disease is of so malignant a nature that it converts all it takes into its own nourishment." - Joseph Addison
"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"You cannot eradicate disease from the human body unless you eradicate it from the body politic." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"Although physicians frequently know their patients will die of a given disease, they never tell them so. To warn of an evil is justified only if, along with the warning, there is a way of escape." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"There is no mortal whom pain and disease do not reach." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman." - Marian Anderson
"Misery is a communicable disease." - Martha Graham
"The human being as a commodity is the disease of our age." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
"A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The most costly disease is not cancer or coronaries. The most costly disease is boredom - costly for both individual and society." - Norman Cousins
"Indulgence in constant thoughts of fear, anger, melancholy, remorse, envy, sorrow, hatred, discontent, or worry; and lack of the necessities for normal and happy living, such as right food, proper exercise, fresh air, sunshine, agreeable work and a purpose in life, all are causes of nervous disease." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing." - Paul Tournier
"Atheism is a disease of the soul, before it becomes an error of the understanding." - Plato NULL
"Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease, and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord; and the supreme arts of temperance, of justice, and of wisdom, as they are acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its inexperience of evil, and whose utter name is, by their award, simpleness and ignorance of what all men who live aright should know." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Men's prayers are a disease of the will." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of a disease which does not at once suggest a cure." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Perhaps more than any other single factor, the intimate alchemy between the healer and the patient helps mobilize the body's natural resources. The mere presence of a healer often evokes hope in the patient and an expectation of recovery. When the two people create a partnership based on compassion, trust, and shared decision-making, and when the relationship nurtures the patient's hope for a positive outcome, even seemingly incurable diseases sometimes go into remission.... insistently restoring the human heart to the practice of medicine. Rather than treating patients as disease processes, they risk bringing their full humanness to the therapeutic encounter. They not only call on their technological expertise, but on the inner qualities practiced by healers from time immemorial: patience, humility, compassion, and an ability to inspire and mobilize their patients' healing resources." - Ronald S. Miller
"Envy is a blemish of the mind; it is to the mind what disease is to the body." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"Who is a skilled physician? He who can prevent disease." - Sefer Hasidism
"Our minds are so constructed that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the highest degree of perfection will take cognizance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference between the minds of different individuals. This is the history alike of the poetic genius and of the genius of discovery in science. “I keep the subject,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “constantly before me, and wait until the dawnings open by little and little into a full light.” It was thus that after long meditation he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of the diamond. It was thus that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, and that those views were suggested by Davy which laid the foundation of that grand series of experimental researches which terminated in the decomposition of the earths and alkalies." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
"The failure of the mind in old age is often less the results of natural decay, than of disuse. Ambition has ceased to operate; contentment bring indolence, and indolence decay of mental power, ennui, and sometimes death. Men have been known to die, literally speaking, of disease induced by intellectual vacancy." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
"Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. To much overcharges nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. It is thought, and digestion which makes books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind." - Thomas Fuller
"The safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as its sends physical disease after physical trespasses." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"The [doctor] has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease." - Ashley Montagu, fully Montague Francis Ashley Montagu, born Israel Ehrenberg