Illness Quotes

Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties…Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.

~ Elisabeth Tova Bailey

No person can escape the germs of their eventual deterioration and destruction. A round-table of physical breakdown and death awaits the rich person and the poor person, as well as the common people and world leaders. The skulls of noble men and savages alike litter the streets of ancient cities. Modern humans live longer than the ancient people did, but eventually we all succumb to the same wretched infirmities.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I did not know what she suffered from, but I knew that her malady must have been horrible; I knew that from the way she used to embrace me.

~ Octave Mirbeau

What if...the doctors couldn't find anything wrong? What if I was over-exaggerating the pain, weakness, and weird sensations?

~ Jennifer Starzec

She is no longer a solitary being. She is a million different parts, each reborn, granted the miracle she prayed for in the months before her death, to be completely healed. Death is the price for rebirth.Death. Who would have thought it would come with such great joy? Yet, after long years battling illness, death is suddenly more than welcome.

~ Victoria Kahler

Illness especially, may be a blessed forerunner of the individual’s conversion. Not only does it prevent him from realizing his desires; it even reduces his capacity for sin, his opportunities for vice. In that enforced detachment from evil, which is a Mercy of God, he has time to search himself, to appraise his life, to interpret it in terms of larger reality. He considers God, and, at that moment, there is a sense of duality, a confronting of personality with Divinity, a comparison of the facts of his life with the ideal from which he fell. The soul is forced to look inside itself, to inquire whether there is more peace in this suffering than in sinning. Once a sick man, in his passivity, begins to ask, “What is the purpose of my life? Why am I here?” the crisis has already begun. Conversion becomes possible the very moment a man ceases to blame God or life and begins to blame himself; by doing so, he becomes able to distinguish between his sinful barnacles and the ship of his soul. A crack has appeared in the armor of his egotism; now the sunlight of God’s grace can pour in. But until that happens, catastrophes can teach us nothing but despair.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

One of my biggest problems in dealing with the breakdown of my body is that I keep looking in the wrong direction. I look to the past and the capabilities I once had, instead of looking to the future and what I will someday become in the presence and by the grace of God. Perhaps that is the strongest temptation for you too. Our culture reinforces that mistake by its refusal to talk about heaven, as if it were an old-fashioned and outdated notion. We also intensify the problem by craving present health (as limited as it can be) more than we desire God.A friend once said to me. This is so hard getting old—there are so many things we can‘t do any more. I guess the Lord wants to teach us something. Indeed, our bodies will never be what they previously were, and we find that difficult because we miss our former activities. But God wants to teach us to hunger for Him, our greatest treasure. Instead of rejecting the notion of heaven, we genuinely ache in our deepest self to fill that concept with a larger landscape of the Joy of basking in God‘s presence.

~ Marva J. Dawn

I worked on Mauna Kea for over five years and saw my health severely degrade during that time. Thetwo long term summit workers that I knew well died of disease conditions, another worker went on tocommit suicide, and others were argumentative.

~ Steven Magee

They're not doing much for themselves. I'm sure they'd rather slip away, relax their fingers and float, but they can't. They're not allowed. Effort is so painful; our knuckles are white, yet we keep clinging. The alternative is suicide- and we are too fearful for that.

~ Wesley Stace

To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.

~ Roman Payne

I don’t understand hospital chaplains that try to rob my patients of their anger. Sometimes anger is a key motivator that gets people to take action. Anger can push a cancer patient to jump out of his hospital bed, walk down to the nurses station and scream, “I am getting the hell out of here!”. There is a misconception that God is simply sweet and passive. Actually, God can be quite cunning, manipulative and relentless with his children. What we consider as negative traits are actually helpful in molding us. He will use a negative emotion if needed to push people to do things that will change them for the better. He will allow people or situations to derail us if there is a chance that those interactions will push us forward. Personally, I don’t want a God that is going to send some church member to my deathbed with a plate of cookies and tell me to have faith. Actually, I rather have a God that screams, “Get the hell off your ass, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Walk down the hall with that Physical Therapist so you can get on with your life! A little anger in a person can push them to do amazing things.

~ Shannon L. Alder

A Miracle is nothing more, than the removal of an Illusion.

~ Vivian Amis

I believe that for every illness or ailment known to man, that God has a plant out here that will heal it. We just need to keep discovering the properties for natural healing.

~ Vannoy Gentles Fite

Unhealthy behavior is actually common among doctors, who tend to know a lot about medicine but very little about health.

~ Sol Luckman

So long as the processes of healing were not understood and man thought that the power to heal resided in substances and things outside of him, he logically sought for extrinsic means of healing, and a healing art was a logical development. The system of medicine, as we know it today, was a logical development out of the fallacy that healing power resides in extrinsic sources.

~ Herbert M. Shelton

it seemed that the pain of their physical illness at times was less than the misery of their poverty ridden existence, the unending wait in the queues and the feeling of hopelessness and abandonment by your own system was enough to rob them of their will power to fight any disease.

~ Madhu Vajpayee

There are places where you can live only when you are healthy, in those places when you fall ill it's the end of you for most people there can’t afford medical care.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Treatments worked well enough for us to get by. Most people lived into old age, but the medication, like everything else, has never been free. Life was a privilege, not a right, apparently. Something you had to struggle for when you were unlucky enough to be born at the intersection of poverty and bad genes.

~ Jacqueline Koyanagi

The best stories are the ones with the unexpected plot twists that no one would have guessed, even the writer.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands the disease. How can you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.

~ Marcel Proust

Before I knew it, I was once again being whisked down the hallways at the new hospital into an even bigger room, one that, unbeknownst to me, would be my home for what would feel like a long, long time.

~ Jennifer Starzec

Each of us carries a sleeping tiger inside, and we can’t predict when that cat will wake, stretch, and sharpen its claws.

~ Holly Robinson

As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives -- everyone dies eventually -- but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.

~ Paul Kalanithi

By far the most significant consequence of selfish capitalism (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s.

~ Oliver James

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

~ Siri Hustvedt

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

~ Siri Hustvedt

She sounded angry. That was the way she'd been as long as he'd known her. If she became ill, it irritated her. She was annoyed by sickness. She seemed to regard it as a personal affront.

~ Richard Matheson

It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.

~ Jonathan Rosen

If the natural environment is changed and the electromagnetic radiation levels increase, then it may cause illness and disease in humans.

~ Steven Magee

The human body is a tube and tank machine with an electrical system that is made up of trillions of cells and two fluids, which are designed to create and react to chemistry. While this machine can malfunction, malfunctions can be fixed.” – Kevin W. Reese

~ Kevin W. Reese

Where there is ignorance, sickness will thrive.

~ Osamu Tezuka

Nothing's scarier than having a sick child, and one so newly born, and so vulnerable. It's the worst thing for a parent.

~ Kenneth Oppel

Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.

~ Chris Cleave

A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it.

~ Nancy Horan

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

~ Julian Seifter

Love is an illness which doesn't have good nor recompense.

~ Ali Ibn Abi Talib

The medication given during mental-ill health makes you rather weaker in body, in soul and in spirit.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There are no doubts that western governments are willfully inducing radiation sickness into segments of their city populations.

~ Steven Magee

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted.

~ Gary Taubes