Great Throughts Treasury

"If we would keep filling our minds with the picture of happy things ahead, many of the worries and anxieties, and perhaps ill health, would naturally melt away... If we lived in the atmosphere of expectancy, so many of our petty problems would be no problems at all! Always expect the best." - George Matthew Adams

"Character is very much a matter of health." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"Health and cheerfulness make beauty." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

"Agriculture is the noblest of all alchemy; for it turns earth, and even manure, into gold, conferring upon its cultivator the additional reward of health." - Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith

"Envy is an ill-natured vice, and is made up of meanness and malice. It wishes the force of goodness to be strained, and the measure of happiness abated. It laments over prosperity, and sickens at the sight of health. It oftentimes wants spirit as well as good nature." - Jeremy Collier

"Good sense, good health, good conscience, and good fame - all these belong to virtue, and all prove that virtue has a title to your love." - William Cowper

"Next to temperance, a quiet conscience, a cheerful mind, and active habits, I place early rising as a means of health and happiness." -

"Good is all that serves life, evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life...and all that enhances life. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it to pieces... Dostoevsky said, "If there is no God, then anything is possible." I would say that if there is no love, nothing is possible. Man absolutely cannot live by himself... Uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible." -

"There are usually no benefits from becoming angry at others. Your anger does not help you and the subject of your anger usually pays less attention to what you are saying than if you would have said it tactfully and patiently. Becoming angry merely causes harm to your health and makes you feel miserable." - Avraham Grodzinski

"Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty, and of ease; and the beauteous sister of temperance, of cheerfulness, and health; and profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debts, and so fetters them with irons that enter into their innermost souls." - John Hawkesworth

"In building a firm foundation for Success, here are a few stones to remember: The wisdom of preparation. The value of confidence. The worth of honesty. The privilege of working. The discipline of struggle. The magnetism of character. The radiance of health. The forcefulness of simplicity. The winsomeness of courtesy. The attractiveness of modesty. The inspiration of cleanliness. The satisfaction of serving. The power of suggestion. The buoyancy of enthusiasm. The advantage of initiative. The virtue of patience. The rewards of co-operation. The fruitfulness of perseverance. The sportsmanship of losing. The joy of winning." - Rollo C. Hester

"Suffering is a great teacher. Suffering teaches you the limitations of your power; it reminds you of the frailty of your health, the instability of your possessions, and the inadequacy of your means which have only been lent to you and must be returned as soon as the Owner desires it. Suffering visits you and teaches you the nothingness of your false greatness. It teaches you modesty." - Samson Raphael Hirsch

"Wisdom is the health of the soul." - Victor Hugo

"A large amount of physical pain and suffering is caused by one’s thoughts and behaviors. The desire for food causes people to overeat and consume food that is harmful to their health. Envy, anger, and honor-seeking lead to diseases of the heart, high blood pressure, nervous tension and excessive stress. Moreover, even when you pain is basically caused by physical symptoms, your mental attitude towards the pain can greatly increase or decrease the actual amount of suffering you experience. The pain you suffer from illnesses and injuries is frequently more psychological than physical. A person who learns to master a calm and serene attitude towards life trains himself to tolerate physical pain and the actual suffering is greatly lessened." - Pinchos Hurwitz

"Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits." - Thomas Jefferson

"Health is so necessary to all the duties as well as pleasures of life that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly." -

"To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues." -

"Happiness has little to do with age, circumstances, health, wealth, learning or status. It follows as you become a part of life's solution rather than its problem." - Roy C. McLain

"Cheerfulness, sir, is the principal ingredient in the composition of health." - Arthur Murphy, pseudonym Charles Ranger

"Not need, nor desire - no, the love of power is the demon of man. One may give them everything - health, nourishment, quarters, they remain unhappy; for the demon insists on being satisfied. One may take away everything from them and satisfy this demon: they then are almost happy." -

"Virtue is health, vice is sickness." - Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL

"The health of the soul is to have its faculties - reason, high spirit, and desire - happily tempered, with reason in command, and reining in both the other two, like restive horses. The special name of this health is temperance." - Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

"Health care is being converted from a social service to an economic commodity, sold in the marketplace and distributed on the basis of who can afford to pay it." - Arnold Seymour Relman

"Sleep, riches, and health are only truly enjoyed after they have been interrupted." -

"Happiness! That's nothing more than good health and a poor memory." - Albert Schweitzer

"Whatever you have received more than others - in health, in talents, in ability, in success, in a pleasant childhood, in harmonious conditions of home life - all this you must not take to yourself as a matter of course. In gratitude for your good fortune, you must render in return some sacrifice of your own life for another life." - Albert Schweitzer

"The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be." - O. Carl Simonton

"As a man grows older, he values the voice of experience more and the voice of prophecy less. He finds more of life's wealth in the common pleasures - home, health, children. He thinks more about worth of men and less about their wealth. He boasts less and boosts more. He hurries less, and usually makes more progress. He esteems the friendship of God a little higher." - Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist

"Good humor is the health of the soul; sadness its poison." - Stanislaw I, born Stanisław Leszczyński, also spelled Stanislaus NULL

"Nothing in this life, after health and virtue, is more estimable than knowledge, nor is there anything so easily attained, or so cheaply purchased, the labor, only sitting still, and the expense but time, which, if we do not spend, we cannot save." - Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne

"The emancipation of our physical nature is in attaining health, of our social being in attaining goodness, and of our self in attaining love." -

"All man’s efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom." -

"Every virtue gives a man a degree of felicity in some kind: honesty gives a man a good report; justice, estimation; prudence, respect; courtesy and liberality, affection; temperance gives health; fortitude, a quiet mind, not to be moved by any adversity." - Francis Walsingham, fully Sir Francis Walsingham

"Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce in a country like ours, general prosperity, content and cheerfulness." - Daniel Webster

"Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all, ever since what might be call’d thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance to justify the ways of God to man... which is the foundation of moral America... to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism through Time." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Three outstanding qualities make for success: judgment, industry, health. And the greatest of these is judgment." - William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, aka Lord Beaverbrook

"In health there is liberty. Health is the first of all liberties, and happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health." -

"Our dependence outweighs our independence, for we are independent only in our desire, while we are dependent on our health, on nature, on society, on everything in us and outside us." -

"There is no curing a sick man who believes himself in health." -

"A man needs a purpose for real health." - Sherwood Anderson

"When it comes to your health, I recommend frequent doses of that rare commodity among Americans - common sense." - Vincent Askey, fully E. Vincent Askey

"Vivacity is the health of the spirit." - Honoré de Balzac

"From labor, health; from health, contentment springs." - James Beattie

"You have to live on twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness - the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends! - depends on that!" - Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett

"Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobbler is better than a sick king." -

"Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." - Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England

"Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall

"There is the laughter which is born out of the pure joy of living, the spontaneous expression of health and energy - the secret laughter of the child. This is a gift of God. There is the warm laughter of the kindly soul which heartens the discouraged, gives health to the sick and comfort to the dying... There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter that triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence." - J. E. Boodin

"Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking; just as ill health indicates bad regimen." - Paul Bourget, fully Paul Charles Joseph Bourget

"As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence to go with them." - Louis Bromfield