You wanted to get well.… Asked your greatest wish in life, you would have replied at once—sanity.… In the world outside, people longed desperately to be millionaires, movie actors, club presidents.… But nowhere, nowhere save the madhouse, did mental health get its share of prayers.
—Mary Jane Ward
They told me that her blood was too thick for her heart to pump, and I wondered how it was that someone stayed alive so long after nothing's left. I had seen bugs crushed and gone so quickly. I couldn't decide if life was fragile or tenacious beyond belief.
—Patricia Bralley
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not.
—Mark Twain
Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
—Ivan Illich
Healthy people are always prejudiced against medicine.
—Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Thousands upon thousands of persons have studied disease. Almost no one has studied health.
—Adelle Davis
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
—George Orwell
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
—Gustave Flaubert
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
—Quentin Crisp
I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is two weeks.
—Totie Fields
The first wealth is health.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have every sympathy with the American [smoker] who was so horrified by what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.
—Henry G. Strauss
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.
—Dave Barry
As I see it, every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.
—Adelle Davis
Every patient carries her or his own doctor inside.
—Albert Schweitzer