Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
—Thomas Mann, 1924
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Quotes
There is no greater disaster than not to know contentment.
—Laozi, c. 550 BCJust as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903War is sweet to those who don’t know it.
—Erasmus, 1508The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.
—William James, 1902It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1962No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860Enemies are so stimulating.
—Katharine Hepburn, 1969How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.
—Derek Walcott, 1986As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.
—Chinua Achebe, 1958Jokes are grievances.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1969Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960