Pathology Quotes

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

~ Alain De Botton

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.

~ Richard Selzer

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.

~ Christopher Hitchens

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological.

~ Charles Bernheimer

Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The situation with regard to insulin is particularly clear. In many parts of the world diabetic children still die from lack of this hormone. ... [T]hose of us who search for new biological facts and for new and better therapeutic weapons should appreciate that one of the central problems of the world is the more equitable distribution and use of the medical and nutritional advances which have already been established. The observations which I have recently made in parts of Africa and South America have brought this fact very forcible to my attention.

~ Charles Herbert Best

The pathology of normalcy rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.

~ Erich Fromm

A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.

~ Ellen Glasgow

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Belief begins where science leaves off and ends where science begins.

~ Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow

DeeDee had to have a firm grasp on reality. Yet she knew God was bigger than a pathology report. So she prayed.

~ K. Howard Joslin

It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy.

~ Frank Tallis

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

By the deficits we may know the talents, by the exceptions we may know the rules, by studying patholgoy we may construct a model of health.

~ Laurence Miller

Those who have dissected or inspected many [bodies] have at least learnt to doubt, while others who are ignorant of anatomy and do not take the trouble to attend it are in no doubt at all.

~ Giovanni Battista Morgagni

When you take the time to really know yourself—know your values, know your beliefs, know what is important to you—you can make the right choice, even when it’s hard.We all have choices. We can choose our direction, every single day.

~ Suraj Dahal

Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.

~ Craig Ferguson

Disease may be defined as 'A change produced in living things in consequence of which they are no longer in harmony with their environment.

~ William Thomas Councilman

Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells

~ Yann Martel

There are no mineral monsters.

~ Canguilhem