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

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

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

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.”

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.