Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

All pain is one malady with many names.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.