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.

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.

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.”

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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