It is good that fire should burn, even if it consumes your house; it is good that force should crush, even if it crushes you; it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys your crops and floods your land. Plagues and pestilences attest to the constancy of natural law. They set us to cleaning our streets and houses and to readjusting our relations to outward nature. Only in a live universe could disease and death prevail. Death is a phase of life, a redistributing of the type. Decay is another kind of growth.
—John Burroughs
It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like.
—Jackie Mason
Making money ain't nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner, but you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you're just as graveyard dead.
—Louis Armstrong
I thought I wanted his love, but really I wanted his pity. I wanted to quit. But he wouldn't let me. "A good doctor can cure your illness, but only the greatest doctor can show you you were never sick," Roshi has said.
—Shozan Jack Haubner in Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk
No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.
—Djuna Barnes
Feed a fever, starve a cold. Lightly sup with rickets.
—Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata