You’ve heard of people calling in sick. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well? It’d go like this: You’d get the boss on the line and say, “Listen, I’ve been sick ever since I started working here, but today I’m well and I won’t be in anymore.” Call in well.

purpose health work mental health illness

About Tom Robbins

Portrait of Tom Robbins

Thomas Eugene Robbins (July 22, 1932 – February 9, 2025) was an American novelist. His most notable works are "seriocomedies" (also known as "comedy dramas"). His 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was adapted into the 1993 film version by Gus Van Sant. His last work, published in 2014,...

More quotations from Tom Robbins

There are only two mantras: yum and yuck. Mine is yum.

philosophy fondness mantras

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

humanity progress change responsibility caution playfulness

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.

love memory need confusion wishing

So you think that you’re a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What’s wrong with that? In the first place, if you’ve any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

freedom style failure grace triumph defeat

There is no such thing as a weird human being, It’s just that some people require more understanding than others.

attention understanding patience weirdness

More quotations tagged with “illness”

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

—Francis Bacon

illness land sea

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

—Fran Lebowitz

love reality romance illness

Ed felt faint. Milk shake, as it turned out, was much less handy in your veins then, say, oxygen.

—Francine Pascal in Sam

milkshakes blood illness oxygen

Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath.

—Charlotte Joko Beck

life joy illness fortune

Being considered or labeled mentally disordered—abnormal, crazy, mad, psychotic, sick, it matters not what variant is used—is the most profoundly discrediting classification that can be imposed on a person today. Mental illness casts the "patient" out of our social order just as surely as heresy cast the "witch" out of medieval society. That, indeed, is the very purpose of stigma terms.

—Thomas Szasz

society stigma illness mental illness

History

3 Mar 2014 Added