Quotes about diseases
A collection of quotes on the topic of death, pain, disease, use.
Best quotes about diseases

“Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.”
Source: Life and How to Survive It

“The gods have become our diseases.”

“The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.”

“… humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world.”
Variant: humanity is a cancer on the body of the world
Source: Pretties

“Love as a force contributory to disease.”
The title of "Dr. Krokowski" lectures. Ch. 4
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.”
Source: Prometheus Bound, line 378; compare: "Apt words have power to suage / The tumours of a troubl'd mind", John Milton, Samson Agonistes.

“I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.”
Quotes about diseases

Statement to the press (23 November 1991), the day before his death, as quoted at The Biography Channel http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biography_story/338:294/1/Freddie_Mercury.htm.

Autobiography of A.T. Still, page 253.

About the role of J. Pierpont Morgan, and the failure of Tesla's "World System" project
My Inventions (1919)
Context: He had the highest regard for my attainments and gave me every evidence of his complete faith in my ability to ultimately achieve what I had set out to do. I am unwilling to accord to some small−minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time, but the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.

Quoted in: Ingo F. Walther (1996), Picasso, p. 67.
Attributed from posthumous publications

Source: The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

“Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.”

Sitting Bull: The Collected Speeches, p. 75
Sourced quotes

Source: Discovering Buddhism, 2004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=226w04QMPzQ

“Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!”
Drawn and Quartered (1983)

As quoted by Malcolm Muggeridge in Something Beautiful for God http://books.google.com/books?id=irO7hAQLmsMC&q="The+biggest+disease+today+is+not+leprosy+or+tuberculosis+but+rather+the+feeling+of+being+unwanted"&pg=PA73#v=onepage (1971)
1970s

"How the Poor Die" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/Poor_Die/english/e_pdie, Now (November 1946)

“As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.”
Epidemics, Book I, Ch. 2, Full text online at Wikisource
Variant translation: The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.
Paraphrased variants:
Wherever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.
Viking Book of Aphorisms : A Personal Selection (1988) by W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, p. 213.

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

Columbus Day Speech, San Francisco (1992)

Journal of Discourses 13:143 (July 11, 1869)
1860s

A Murderous Fox Has Made Me Shoot David Beckham, p. 161
The World According to Clarkson (2005)
Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. [1] ("y(male)" & "x(female)" spaceless in original).

X, 35
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
Context: The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of the diseased eye. And the healthy hearing and smelling ought to be ready to perceive all that can be heard and smelled. And the healthy stomach ought to be with respect to all food just as the mill with respect to all things which it is formed to grind. And accordingly the healthy understanding ought to be prepared for everything which happens; but that which says, Let my dear children live, and let all men praise whatever I may do, is an eye which seeks for green things, or teeth which seek for soft things.

1960s, The American Promise (1965)
Context: For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror? So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future. This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall over, come.

as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1256603608595872&url=www.geocities.com/monedem/keyn.html
Essays in Persuasion (1931), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Context: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

Variant: God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fool
Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 10: The American Forests <!-- Terry Gifford, EWDB, pages 604-605 -->
Context: Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed — chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. … It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries … God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.
“I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.”
Daniel Martin (1977)
Source: The Magus
Context: I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Source: The Prophecy Answer Book

“The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.”


“All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.”
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.”

“We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.”

“I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.”
Source: The End of the Affair

“No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.”
“The world's most deadly disease is "hardening of the attitudes."”
As quoted in Secrets of Superstar Speakers: Wisdom from the Greatest Motivators of Our Time (2000) by Lilly Walters, p. 96

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

DIE ZEIT, 30. August 2007, Zeit.de http://www.zeit.de/2007/36/Interview-Helmut-Schmidt?page=all

“Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease.”
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

“Sleep and watchfulness, both of them, when immoderate, constitute disease.”
7:72.
Aphorisms

“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”
According to The Veterinarian (Monthly Journal of Veterinary Science) for 1851, edited by Mr. Percivall, this is Ben Jonson's "satirical definition of physic".
Misattributed

"The Private Production of Defense" http://www.mises.org/journals/scholar/Hoppe.pdf (15 June 1999)

In "The Tao of Jeet Kune Do" by Bruce Lee (1975, compiled and published posthumously) and also in Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living (2000) edited by John Little, this is attributed to Lee, perhaps because it was found in his notes, but it is also quoted in precisely this form, from what appear to be translations of Taoist writings in The Religions of Man (1958) by Huston Smith. It is actually from Xinxin Ming, by the Third Chinese Chan [Zen] Patriarch Sengcan.
Misattributed

" VIII. ON "LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOSSOM LET A HUNDRED SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT CONTEND" AND "LONG-TERM COEXISTENCE AND MUTUAL SUPERVISION" "
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 马克思主义者不应该害怕任何人批评。相反,马克思主义者就是要在人们的批评中间,就是要在斗争的风雨中间,锻炼自己,发展自己,扩大自己的阵地。同错误思想作斗争,好比种牛痘,经过了牛痘疫苗的作用,人身上就增强免疫力。在温室里培养出来的东西,不会有强大的生命力。实行百花齐放、百家争鸣的方针,并不会削弱马克思主义在思想界的领导地位,相反地正是会加强它的这种地位。

“Resist beginnings; the remedy comes too late when the disease has gained strength by long delays.”
Principiis obsta; sero medicina paratur
Cum mala per longas convaluere moras.
Source: Remedia Amoris (The Cure for Love), Lines 91–92

In diesen Sanct-Johann- und Sanct-Veittänzern erkennen wir die bacchischen Chöre der Griechen wieder, mit ihrer Vorgeschichte in Kleinasien, bis hin zu Babylon und den orgiastischen Sakäen. Es giebt Menschen, die, aus Mangel an Erfahrung oder aus Stumpfsinn, sich von solchen Erscheinungen wie von "Volkskrankheiten", spöttisch oder bedauernd im Gefühl der eigenen Gesundheit abwenden: die Armen ahnen freilich nicht, wie leichenfarbig und gespenstisch eben diese ihre "Gesundheit" sich ausnimmt, wenn an ihnen das glühende Leben dionysischer Schwärmer vorüberbraust.
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 17

Statements (c. December 1907), in Mark Twain In Eruption : Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men And Events (1940) edited by Bernard Augustine De Voto

7:87
Variant translation: What cannot be cured by medicaments is cured by the knife, what the knife cannot cure is cured with the searing iron, and whatever this cannot cure must be considered incurable.
Aphorisms

"Thoughts of a Free Thinker", commencement address, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (26 May 1974)
Palm Sunday (1981)

2014, Statement on Cuban policy (December 2014)

1850s, Speech at Lewistown, Illinois (1858)

“Atheism is a disease of the soul, before it becomes an error of the understanding.”
Misattributed to Plato in Laws by Conservapedia http://www.conservapedia.com/Atheism_Quotes. Actual source: William Fleming, as quoted in Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay by Samuel Austin Allibone, 1816–1889. http://www.bartleby.com/349/authors/74.html
Misattributed

“For if vicious propensity is, as it were, a disease of the soul like bodily sickness, even as we account the sick in body by no means deserving of hate, but rather of pity, so, and much more, should they be pitied whose minds are assailed by wickedness, which is more frightful than any sickness.”
Nam si uti corporum languor ita vitiositas quidam est quasi morbus animorum, cum aegros corpore minime dignos odio sed potius miseratione iudicemus, multo magis non insequendi sed miserandi sunt quorum mentes omni languore atrocior urguet improbitas.
Prose IV; line 42; translation by H. R. James
Alternate translation:
For as faintness is a disease of the body, so is vice a sickness of the mind. Wherefore, since we judge those that have corporal infirmities to be rather worthy of compassion than of hatred, much more are they to be pitied, and not abhorred, whose minds are oppressed with wickedness, the greatest malady that may be.
The Consolation of Philosophy · De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book IV

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 393
Quoted by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Colorado Outward Bound's 25th anniversary in 1987; as cited in Leadership the Outward Bound Way (2007), ISBN 159485033X.

Les médecins administrent des médicaments dont ils savent très peu, à des malades dont ils savent moins, pour guérir des maladies dont ils ne savent rien.
This attribution to Voltaire appears in Strauss' Familiar Medical Quotations (1968), p. 394, and in publications as early as 1956 http://books.google.pt/books?id=lCtCAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Doctors+are+men+who+prescribe+medicine+of%22&dq=%22Doctors+are+men+who+prescribe+medicine+of%22&hl=pt-PT&sa=X&ei=mbnWUsvDIfTB7Aaw_YD4Dw&redir_esc=y; the quotation in French does not, however, appear to be original, and is probably a relatively modern invention, only quoted in recent (21st century) published works, which attribute it to "Voltaire" without citing any source.
Attributed

Aleksandra Piłsudski, Memoirs of Madame Piłsudski, 1940
Attributed

“Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.”
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

“Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by Passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.”
Novalis (1829)