Archive

Quotes

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

—Alexander of Tralles, c. 600

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1884

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

—Confucius, c. 515 BC

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BC

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

—Sylvia Plath, 1963

A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.

—Eric Hodgins, 1964

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

—Herophilus, c. 290 BC