Selected health quotes

1. 'I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.'

2. I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

3. I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.

4. Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

5. Black Americans make up 10 or 11% of the population, but they account now for something of 40 to 45% of all the abortions. This is a privileged position that I'm not sure anyone in their right mind would aspire to.

6. Serious illness doesn't bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host.

7. Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.

8. There is just no sensible, logical reason why we would not make use of stem cell research.

9. Heart disease continues to be the number one killer; cancer, the number 2 killer, not far behind. The tragic aspect of these deadly diseases is that they could all be cured, I do believe, if we had sufficient funding.

10. I think in England you eat too much sugar and meat and not enough vegetables.

11. Their diet is basically boiled vegetables, fish and rice. No fat, no sugar. You notice when you live there that there are no fat people.

12. As a coach you can influence the diet of your players. You can point out what is wrong.

13. Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.

14. I'm not always depressed: only when I think and feel.

15. My struggle to remain healthy is gradually killing me.

16. You are what you eat, but eventually you become what eats you.

17. Life is an incurable condition: the only known treatment is to try to keep the patient comfortable.

18. The longer I live, the less chance I'll ever recover from what life keeps doing to me.

19. My problems aren't big but it doesn't necessarily take a big problem to kill me.

20. It costs money to stay healthy, but it's even more expensive to get sick.

21. I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It's probably the most important thing in a person.

22. Reading isn't good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn't hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

23. When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic.

24. What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?

25. Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

26. I think I'll have a large order of prognosis negative.

27. Old age is no place for sissies.

28. While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances.

29. You can't talk of the dangers of snake poisoning and not mention snakes.

30. Actresses can get outrageously precious about the way they look. That's not what life's about. If you starve yourself to the point where your brain cells shrivel, you will never do good work. And if you're overly conscious of your arms flapping in the wind, how can you look the other actor in the eye to respond to them?

31. Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.

32. We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.

33. As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula.

34. It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person's plate.

35. Winter's here, and you feel lousy: You're coughing and sneezing; your muscles ache; your nose is an active mucus volcano. These symptoms -- so familiar at this time of year -- can mean only one thing: Tiny fanged snails are eating your brain.

36. Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land.

37. Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

38. Laughter is by definition healthy.

39. It should not be an act of social disobedience to light a cigarette. Unless you're actually a doctor working at an incubator.

40. If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

41. We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.

42. Regardless of the dutiful pushing of condoms in the girls' press, the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm.

43. I'm not feeling very well, I need a doctor immediately. Ring the nearest golf course.

44. A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

45. To get out of bed on the wrong side probably means that you had had too much the night before.

46. When we turn to the government to stop someone from ruining his life with drugs, we convert a personal tragedy into a national disaster.

47. Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.

48. Today's results put an end to speculation, but our son's beautiful spirit and enduring memory will forever remain in our hearts. While no medications were taken in excess, we learned today the combination of doctor-prescribed drugs proved lethal for our boy. Heath's accidental death serves as a caution to the hidden dangers of combining prescription medication, even at low dosage.

49. Mr Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine. We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications.

50. Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.

51. An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

52. If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

53. To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.

54. A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.

55. Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came they murmured as they took their fees, 'There is no cure for this disease.'

56. I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.

57. I went to a meeting for premature ejaculators. I left early.

58. Jack: Smell?... What do I want with smelling salts?

59. Your waistline is your lifeline.

60. The food you eat today is walking and talking tomorrow.

61. Better to wear out than rust out.

62. People don't die of old age, they die of neglect.

63. Ten seconds on the lips and a lifetime in the hips.

64. You eat everyday, you sleep everyday, your body was made to exercise everyday.

65. The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the kick.

66. Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

67. If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism.... The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

68. It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

69. When I got through with him, he was all covered wit' blood- my blood.

70. Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft.

71. When a man stops to ponder his physical or moral condition, he generally finds he is ill.

72. I observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease.

73. 'Tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess.

74. It's amazing when you get to a certain age, and you talk about sleep in the same way you spoke about inebriates 20 or 25 years before. 'Man, I got eight hours last night - it was fantastic.' Happily, I haven't found golf yet, but I'm sure that's just around the corner. (2004)

75. [I did] mostly alcohol. There were drugs, too - pills - and there was a danger that I would go over the edge. I could have. I thank God I didn't. (2004)

76. Family and friends sat me down and said, 'Listen, we love you. You're important to us, and you're fucking up. You're killing yourself. You're killing us in the process.' You don't listen right away because you're dumb. You're ignorant. You're human. Finally it seeps in. Finally the body and mind and heart and psyche just go, 'Yeah, you're doing the wrong thing.' (2004)

77. I could see things turning into a nasty tailspin. And then I thought, Maybe I'm slow, but this is ridiculous. Fuck it, just stop! So I stopped everything for the better part of a year. I guess I just reached a point where I said, 'Jesus Christ, what am I doing? Life is fucking good. What am I doing to myself?' Now I drink a glass or two of red wine and that's it. (2004)

78. I cut down [on smoking], I'll have you know. I cut down drastically. After all these years, I've finally figured it out. It's really pointless. (2004)

79. Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

80. You shouldn't be told you're completely irresponsible and be left alone with too much medication. It's too easy to forget. You take a couple of sleeping pills and you wake up in twenty minutes and forget you've taken them. So you take a couple more, and the next thing you know you've taken too many.

81. Thanks to science, the under-privileged are coming to believe that no one need be underfed or chronically diseased, or deprived of the benefits of its technical and practical applications. The world's unrest is largely due to this new belief. People are determined not to put up with a subnormal standard of physical health and material living now that science has revealed the possibility of raising it. The unrest will produce some unpleasant consequences before it is dissipated; but it is in essence a beneficent unrest, a dynamic force which will not be stilled until it has laid the physiological foundations of human destiny.

82. I'm an old man at fifty-four, without teeth, and with rheumatism.

83. As serious as a heart attack. Maybe those were Ken Kramer's last words, like a final explosion of panic in his mind as he stopped breathing and dropped into the abyss. He was out of line, in every way there was, and he knew it. He was where he shouldn't have been, with someone he shouldn't have been with, carrying something he should have kept in a safer place. But he was getting away with it. He was playing and winning. He was on top of his game. He was probably smiling. Until the sudden thump deep inside his chest betrayed him. Then everything turned around. Success became instant catastrophe. He had no time to put anything right.

84. A knowledge of syphilis is not an instruction to get it.

85. I know that I have my own mission and I know that life, unfortunately, is short. I have a limited time, and we have to get as much done as possible, and that's that. And we have to preserve our health.

86. It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics dope and all of that stuff. It is a thousand times better than whiskey. It is an assistant and a friend.

87. The day-to-day exhausted me!

88. I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

89. An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away.

90. Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.

91. The dead on the roads should be buried, not thrown in lakes, wells or rivers, and their belongings are to be burned.

92. Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

93. Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

94. Six hours sleep for a man, seven for a woman and eight for a fool.

95. The best cure for the body is a quiet mind.

96. Water, air, and cleanness are the chief articles in my pharmacy.

97. I have always believed that exercise is the key not only to physical health but to peace of mind.

98. Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

99. She was all of a muck of sweat.

100. His best companions, innocence and health; And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.