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.

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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

If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.