Quotes about illness
page 9

Joaquin Miller photo
Cesare Pavese photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Howard F. Lyman photo
B.K.S. Iyengar photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“In order to know about the illnesses of society, you have to know what men are suffering from, how they suffer.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

As quoted in Testimonies About Che (2006) by Marta Rojas, p. 85

Michel De Montaigne photo

“It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Sam Harris photo

“Many people who experience illness imagine that everyone else is blissfully getting on with life in perfect health—and this illusion compounds their suffering.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Adventures in the Land of Illness http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/adventures-in-the-land-of-illness (May 26, 2014)
2010s

Rudolf Karl Bultmann photo

“We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.”

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

Man kann nicht elektrisches Licht und Radioapparat benutzen, in Krankheitsfällen moderne medizinische und klinische Mittel in Anspruch nehmen und gleichzeitig an die Geister-und Wunderwelt des Neuen Testaments glauben.
Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 4

Annie Besant photo

“Thought is just not something objective in our heads. Thought is power – real, objective power. Moreover, the thoughts we create have a life of their own. They have a kind of material reality that affects other people for good or ill – hence our responsibility to chose.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Power of Thought: A Twenty-First Century Adaptation of Annie Besant's http://books.google.co.in/books?id=SVKqq0dTdSMC&printsec=frontcover, p. backcover

Rob Pike photo
John Heywood photo

“An ill wind that blows no man to good.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part II, chapter 9.
Proverbs (1546)

Cesare Pavese photo

“It wasn't a country where a man could settle down and rest his head and say to the others, "Here I am for good or ill. For good or ill let me leave in peace."”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This was what was frightening.
Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter III, p. 22

Hsu Tzong-li photo
Albert Gleizes photo
Richard Stallman photo
Joel Fuhrman photo
Michelle Obama photo

“And that brings me to the other big lesson that I want to share with you today. It’s a lesson about how to get through those struggles, and that is, instead of letting your hardships and failures discourage or exhaust you, let them inspire you. Let them make you even hungrier to succeed. Now, I know that many of you have already dealt with some serious losses in your lives. Maybe someone in your family lost a job or struggled with drugs or alcohol or an illness. Maybe you’ve lost someone you love […]. […] So, yes, maybe you’ve been tested a lot more and a lot earlier in life than many other young people. Maybe you have more scars than they do. Maybe you have days when you feel more tired than someone your age should ever really feel. But, graduates, tonight, I want you to understand that every scar that you have is a reminder not just that you got hurt, but that you survived. And as painful as they are, those holes we all have in our hearts are what truly connect us to each other. They are the spaces we can make for other people’s sorrow and pain, as well as their joy and their love so that eventually, instead of feeling empty, our hearts feel even bigger and fuller. So it’s okay to feel the sadness and the grief that comes with those losses. But instead of letting those feelings defeat you, let them motivate you. Let them serve as fuel for your journey.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Commencement speech for Martin Luther King Jr. College Prep graduates (2015)

Steven Pinker photo
Antonio Cocchi photo
Koenraad Elst photo

“A man who is not poor nor ill, nor about to be stoned to death, must not distress himself if he does not feel all through his life what faith Stephen had only in his last moments.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 221.

John F. Kennedy photo

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

This is one of seven quotes inscribed on the walls at the gravesite of John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery.
1961, Inaugural Address

Syed Ahmad Barelvi photo
John Betjeman photo

“But I'm dying now and done for,
What on earth was all the fun for?
I am ill and old and terrified and tight.”

John Betjeman (1906–1984) English poet, writer and broadcaster

"Sun and Fun — Song of a Night-club Proprietress", from A Few Late Chrysanthemums.
Poetry

Dorothy L. Sayers photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Stanley Kubrick photo
Max Scheler photo

“Yet all this is not ressentiment. These are only stages in the development of its sources. Revenge, envy, the impulse to detract, spite, *Schadenfreude*, and malice lead to ressentiment only if there occurs neither a moral self-conquest (such as genuine forgiveness in the case of revenge) nor an act or some other adequate expression of emotion (such as verbal abuse or shaking one's fist), and if this restraint is caused by a pronounced awareness of impotence. There will be no ressentiment if he who thirsts for revenge really acts and avenges himself, if he who is consumed by hatred harms his enemy, gives him “a piece of his mind,” or even merely vents his spleen in the presence of others. Nor will the envious fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work, barter, crime, or violence. Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear. Through its very origin, ressentiment is therefore chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. When it occurs elsewhere, it is either due to psychological contagion—and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious—or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by “embittering” and “poisoning” the personality. If an ill-treated servant can vent his spleen in the antechamber, he will remain free from the inner venom of ressentiment, but it will engulf him if he must hide his feelings and keep his negative and hostile emotions to himself.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

“Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.”

J. L. Austin (1911–1960) English philosopher

Austin (1975, p. 18–19) as cited in: James Loxley (2006) Performativity. p. 81.

Kathy Griffin photo

“And then she (Brooke Sheilds) says the ill-fated words "You have to put this in your act". And I said "What, I would never!"”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Because it's a private time!!
Allegedly (2004)

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“539. All Men think their Enemies ill Men.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Thanissaro Bhikkhu photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo

“I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in drink—oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course—very shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin. But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam of riot and stench. Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life. Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment that they live!”

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo
Thomas Noon Talfourd photo
Patrick Pearse photo

“O faithful!
Moulded in one womb,
We have stood together all the years,
All the glad years and all the sorrowful years,
Own brothers: through good repute and ill,
In direst peril true to me,
Leaving all things for me, spending yourself
In the hard service that I taught to you,
Of all the men that I have known on earth,
You only have been my familiar friend,
Nor needed I another.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

"To My Brother", poem by P. H. Pearse, written in Arbour Hill Detention Barracks, 1st May, 1916. Published by The Office of Public Works, Dublin.
Pearse did not know that his brother William, was also to be executed.

William Wordsworth photo

“Few artists were ever fully well, so it is no great trick to prove them ill. There are commentators who can't get interested in Caravaggio until they find out he killed someone. They are only one step from believing that every killer is Caravaggio.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Georg Christoph Lichtenberg', p. 395
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Alexis De Tocqueville photo

“Men in general are neither very good nor very bad, but mediocre… Man with his vices, his weaknesses, his virtues, this confused medley of good and ill, high and low, goodness and depravity, is yet, take him all in all, the object on earth most worthy of study, of interest, of pity, of attachment and of admiration. And since we haven't got angels, we can attach ourselves to nothing greater and more worthy of our devotion than our own kind.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Letter to Eugene Stoffels (Jan. 3, 1845) as quoted by Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (1961) Ch. 11 "Intellectual and Philosopher"
Original text:
Les hommes ne sont en général ni très-bons, ni très-mauvais : ils sont médiocres. [...] L'homme avec ses vices, ses faiblesses, ses vertus, ce mélange confus de bien et de mal, de bas et de haut, d'honnête et de dépravé, est encore, à tout prendre, l'objet le plus digne d'examen, d'intérêt, de pitié, d'attachement et d'admiration qui se trouve sur la terre; et puisque les anges nous manquent, nous ne saurions nous attacher à rien qui soit plus grand et plus digne de notre dévouement que nos semblables.
1840s

Clive Staples Lewis photo
Jane Roberts photo
Adrienne von Speyr photo
Robert Barron (bishop) photo
Giovanni della Casa photo
Elton Mayo photo
John Calvin photo
Donald Barthelme photo

“The Continental Congress resolved that your famous plainneff and modefty would be ill ferved were it known that a houfe for your horfe was paid for from the public purfe.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware”, p. 80.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

John A. McDougall photo
Howard Dean photo
Luis de Góngora photo

“Longer than a winter's night for a man who is ill-wed.”

Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) Spanish Baroque lyric poet

Más largo
que una noche de Diciembre
para un hombre mal casado.
"Murmuraban los rocines", line 94, cited from Poesias de D. Luis de Gongora y Argote (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1820) p. 83. Translation from Henry Baerlein The House of the Fighting-cocks (London: Leonard Parsons, 1922) p. 92.

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“2048. Report not an ill Thing that thou thy self knowest not, but by the Report of a Man, who may lie or aggravate the Matter.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz photo

“You cannot imagine the pleasure you are giving me. This woman and this infant [of an old picture, made in his early years] are my own family. The baby was in its cradle one fine summer day; the mother had fallen asleep beside it. In one hour I did the sketch from nature. It used to hang over my bed, and it cheered my awakening every day for years. Then arrived a morning when we were more in want of necessaries than usual. A dealer came along and offered me a hundred and fifty francs.... he insisted on taking that one in particular. As ill luck would have it, my rent was due next day. I was not in a position to be too particular. He gave me a bank note of one hundred francs, and ten hundred-sous pieces. I made him out a receipt, and he never perceived that he was carrying off a bit of my heart. Ah!, it was hard.”

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz (1807–1876) French painter

Quote of Diaz, late 1860's, recorded by Albert Wolff, in Notes upon certain masters of the XIX century, - printed not published MDCCCLXXXVI (1886), The Art Age Press, 400 N.Y. (written after the exhibition 'Cent Chefs-d'Oeuvres: the Choiche of the French Private Galleries', Petit, Paris / Baschet, New York, 1883, p. 45-46
Albert Wolff, the interviewer, owned this little panel, painted by a young Diaz. It was fifteen centimeters big, and presented a baby lying in a cradle with the mother, guarding it. Wolff returned it to the old Diaz
Quotes of Diaz

Jacob M. Appel photo

“Depression and hopelessness are not the only reasons terminally ill patients wish to end their lives. Many individuals see nothing undignified about choosing to end their lives at the time and manner of their choosing — and many view such a choice as the meaningful culmination of a good life.”

Jacob M. Appel (1973) American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic

"Is it compassionate to prohibit suicide?," http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/letters/bal-ed.le.letters17m11mar17,0,7530016.storyThe Baltimore Sun (2009-03-17)

Jeff Foxworthy photo
Sigmund Freud photo

“Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Letter to an American mother's plea to cure her son's homosexuality (1935)
1930s

Richard Hovey photo

“Nor love they least
Who strike with right good will
To vanquish ill
And fight God’s battle upward from the beast.”

Richard Hovey (1864–1900) American writer

"The Call of the Bugles", p. 15.
Along the Trail (1898)

Margaret Thatcher photo

“All too often the ills of this country are passed off as those of society. Similarly, when action is required, society is called upon to act. But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people. It is people who have duties and beliefs and resolve. It is people who get things done. She prefers to think in terms of the acts of individuals and families as the real sinews of society rather than of society as an abstract concept. Her approach to society reflects her fundamental belief in personal responsibility and choice. To leave things to ‘society’ is to run away from the real decisions, practical responsibility and effective action.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Interview 23 September 1987, as quoted in by Douglas Keay, Woman's Own, 31 October 1987, pp. 8–10. A transcript of the interview http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689 at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website differs in several particulars, but not in substance. The magazine transposed the statement in bold, often quoted out of context, from a later portion of Thatcher's remarks:
Third term as Prime Minister

Mary Astell photo

“An ill husband may deprive a wife of the comfort and quiet of her life, give occasion of exercising her virtue, try her patience and fortitude to the utmost, which is all he can do; it is herself only that can accomplish her ruin.”

Mary Astell (1666–1731) English feminist writer

As quoted in The Whole duty of a woman: female writers in seventeenth century England, p. 157, by Angeline Goreau. Editorial Dial Press, 1985. ISBN 0385278780.

William Cowper photo

“And still to love, though prest with ill,
In wintry age to feel no chill,
With me is to be lovely still,
My Mary!”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

"To Mary", st. 11 (1791).

Aristophanés photo

“Just Cause: [Learn] not to contradict your father in anything; nor by calling him Iapetus, to reproach him with the ills of age, by which you were reared in your infancy.”

tr. Hickie 1853, vol. 1, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Cl.+998
Clouds (423 BC)

George Herbert photo

“310. Keep not ill men company, lest you increase the number.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

F. Paul Wilson photo
John Donne photo

“Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

I. Insultus Morbi Primus; The first alteration, the first grudging of the sickness.
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Jane Austen photo
Poul Anderson photo

“Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce…Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring…
I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill…never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence…As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.
At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.”

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 53-54)

Malcolm Muggeridge photo
Philip Roth photo

“Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.”

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Jane Roberts photo
Plutarch photo

“That proverbial saying, "Ill news goes quick and far."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Of Inquisitiveness
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

George Bernard Shaw photo
Upton Sinclair photo
Lee Atwater photo
Charles de Gaulle photo

“I am not ill. But do not worry, one day, I will certainly die.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic

Je ne vais pas mal. Mais rassurez-vous, un jour, je ne manquerai pas de mourir.
Press conference, February 1965, denying rumours that he secretly had a terminal disease
Fifth Republic and other post-WW2

Gabrielle Giffords photo
Jane Roberts photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“Heal the Wound, Cure the illness, but let the Dying spirit go”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 5

John Bright photo

“You say the right hon. baronet [Peel] is a traitor. It would ill become me to attempt his defence after the speech which he delivered last night—a speech, I will venture to say, more powerful and more to be admired than any speech which has been delivered within the memory of any man in this House. I watched the right hon. baronet as he went home last night, and for the first time I envied him his feelings. That speech was circulated by scores of thousands throughout the kingdom and throughout the world; and wherever a man is to be found who loves justice, and wherever there is a labourer whom you have trampled under foot, that speech will bring joy to the heart of the one, and hope to the breast of the other. You chose the right hon. baronet—why? Because he was the ablest man of your party. You always said so, and you will not deny it now. Why was he the ablest? Because he had great experience, profound attainments, and an honest regard for the good of the country. You placed him in office. When a man is in office he is not the same man as when in opposition. The present generation, or posterity, does not deal as mildly with men in government as with those in opposition. There are such things as the responsibilities of office. Look at the population of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and there is not a man among you who would have the valour to take office and raise the standard of Protection, and cry, "Down with the Anti-Corn Law League, and Protection for ever!" There is not a man in your ranks who would dare to sit on that bench as the Prime Minister of England pledged to maintain the existing law. The right hon. baronet took the only, the truest course—he resigned. He told you by that act: "I will no longer do your work. I will not defend your cause. The experience I have had since I came into office renders it impossible for me at once to maintain office and the Corn Laws."”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

The right hon. baronet resigned—he was then no longer your Minister. He came back to office as the Minister of his Sovereign and of the people.
Speech in the House of Commons (17 February 1846), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 148.
1840s

Albrecht Thaer photo
Ludovico Ariosto photo

“As nought good endures beneath the skies,
So ill endures no more.”

Come cosa buona non si trova
Che duri sempre, così ancor né ria.
Canto XXXVII, stanza 7 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Theodore Tilton photo

“So, lest I be inclined
To render ill for ill,—
Henceforth in me instil,
O God, a sweet good-will
To all mankind.”

Theodore Tilton (1835–1907) American newspaper editor

Sir Marmaduke's Musings, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

George Eliot photo