The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind. --G.K. Chesterton

There's lots of people in this world who spend so much time watching their health that they haven't the time to enjoy it. --Josh Billings

The greatest wealth is health. --Virgil

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better. --Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 1903

Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon. --Doug Larson

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. --World Health Organization, 1948

The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience.  Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around.... Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing. --Larry Dossey

Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway. --Author Unknown

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing. --Redd Foxx

As a people, we have become obsessed with Health.  There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this.  We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying.  We have lost all confidence in the human body. --Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979

In order to change we must be sick and tired of being sick and tired. --Author Unknown

The best six doctors anywhere
And no one can deny it
Are sunshine, water, rest, and air
Exercise and diet.
These six will gladly you attend
If only you are willing
Your mind they'll ease
Your will they'll mend
And charge you not a shilling.
--Nursery rhyme quoted by Wayne Fields, What the River Knows, 1990

He who takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skill of his doctors. --Chinese Proverb

If I'd known I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself. --Leon Eldred

Be careful about reading health books.  You may die of a misprint. --Mark Twain

Red meat is not bad for you.  Now blue-green meat, that's bad for you! --Tommy Smothers

They claim red meat is bad for you.  But I never saw a sick-looking tiger. --Chi Chi Rodriguez

Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life; some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something. --Lord Chesterfield

If the pain wanders, do not waste your time with doctors. --Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The... patient should be made to understand that he or she must take charge of his own life.  Don't take your body to the doctor as if he were a repair shop. --Quentin Regestein

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol. --Author Unknown

Joy and Temperance and Repose
Slam the door on the doctor's nose.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If I had my way I'd make health catching instead of disease. --Robert Ingersoll

Sickness comes on horseback but departs on foot. --Dutch Proverb, sometimes attributed to William C. Hazlitt

Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds. --George Jean Nathan

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body. --Cicero

If you have health, you probably will be happy, and if you have health and happiness, you have all the wealth you need, even if it is not all you want. --Elbert Hubbard

People who are always taking care of their health are like misers who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy. --Laurence Sterne

To feel keenly the poetry of a morning's roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness. --Henri Frederic Amiel

The longer I live the less confidence I have in drugs and the greater is my confidence in the regulation and administration of diet and regimen. --John Redman Coxe, 1800

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book. --Irish Proverb

Fresh air impoverishes the doctor. --Danish Proverb

There are two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth.  Some evils admit of consolations, but there are no comforters for dyspepsia and the toothache. --Henry Lytton Bulwer

Water, air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia. --Napoleon I

The I in illness is isolation, and the crucial letters in wellness are we. --Author unknown, as quoted in Mimi Guarneri, The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing

In minds crammed with thoughts, organs clogged with toxins, and bodies stiffened with neglect, there is just no space for anything else. --Alison Rose Levy, "An Ancient Cure for Modern Life," Yoga Journal, Jan/Feb 2002

Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once. --Thomas Browne

When it comes to eating right and exercising, there is no "I'll start tomorrow."  Tomorrow is disease. --Terri Guillemets

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease. --George Dennison Prentice, Prenticeana, 1860

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey. --Marcel Proust

My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass. --Terri Guillemets

We drink one another's health and spoil our own. --Jerome K. Jerome

In a disordered mind, as in a disordered body, soundness of health is impossible. --Cicero

I think you might dispense with half your doctors if you would only consult Dr. Sun more. --Henry Ward Beecher

Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit.  When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open. --B.K.S. Iyengar

Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws. --Charles Simmons

Mens sana in corpore sano.  (Your prayer must be for a sound mind in a sound body.) --Juvenal

The appearance of a disease is swift as an arrow; its disappearance slow, like a thread. --Chinese Proverb

Nature does require
Her time of preservation, which perforce
I her frail son amongst my brethren mortal
Must give my attendance to.
--William Shakespeare

Health is like munny, we never have a true idea of its value until we lose it. --Josh Billings

A healthy body and soul come from an unencumbered mind and body. --Ymber Delecto

Adam and Eve ate the first vitamins, including the package. --E.R. Squibb

Our body is a machine for living.  It is organized for that, it is its nature.  Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies. --Leo Tolstoy

Gold that buys health can never be ill spent. --Thomas Dekker, Westward Ho, 1604

Disease is somatic; the suffering from it, psychic. --Martin H. Fischer

Health of body and mind is a great blessing, if we can bear it. --John Henry Cardinal Newman

Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, rivel them up like old apples, make them as so many Anatomies. --Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Sometimes I get the feeling the aspirin companies are sponsoring my headaches. --Terri Guillemets

A healthy body is the guest-chamber of the soul; a sick, its prison. --Francis Bacon

An imaginary ailment is worse than a disease. --Yiddish Proverb

Health is a large word.  It embraces not the body only, but the mind and spirit as well;... and not today's pain or pleasure alone, but the whole being and outlook of a man. --James H. West

Hear your heart.  Heart your health. --Faith Seehill

Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady. --François Duc de la Rochefoucauld

From the bitterness of disease man learns the sweetness of health. --Catalan Proverb

If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician. --Meryl Streep

Just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy. --Author Unknown

Every man's disease is his personal property. --Alonzo Clark

Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene
Supports the mind supports the body too.
--John Armstrong

When an illness knocks you on your ass, you should stay and relax for a while before trying to get back up. --Terri Guillemets

I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures. --Robert Benchley, "Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat," No Poems: or around the world backwards and sideways, 1932

Physick, for the most part, is nothing else but the Substitute of Exercise or Temperance. --Joseph Addison

A bad cold wouldn't be so annoying if it weren't for the advice of our friends. --Kin Hubbard

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them. --Aldous Huxley

I see rejection in my skin, worry in my cancers, bitterness and hate in my aching joints.  I failed to take care of my mind, and so my body now goes to hospital. --Astrid Alauda

If you don't take care of yourself, the undertaker will overtake that responsibility for you. --Carrie Latet

The most important thing in illness is never to lose heart. --Nikolai Lenin

The part can never be well unless the whole is well. --Plato

The scientific truth may be put quite briefly; eat moderately, having an ordinary mixed diet, and don't worry. --Robert Hutchison, 1932

If by gaining knowledge we destroy our health, we labour for a thing that will be useless in our hands. --John Locke

To avoid sickness eat less; to prolong life worry less. --Chu Hui Weng

When the head aches, all the body is the worse. --English Proverb

Healthy people are invalids who don't know it. --Jules Romains, Dr. Knock, 1923

If your body's not right, the rest of your day will go all wrong.  Take care of yourself. --Terri Guillemets

After these two, Dr. Diet and Dr. Quiet, Dr. Merriman is requisite to preserve health. --James Howell

When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly. --Friedrich Nietzsche

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of disease. --Edward Jenner

There is something in sickness that breaks down the pride of manhood. --Charles Dickens

Bacteria keeps us from heaven and puts us there. --Martin H. Fischer

Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other. --Joseph Addison

It is a lot harder to keep people well than it is to just get them over a sickness. --DeForest Clinton Jarvis

Life is not merely to be alive, but to be well. --Marcus Valerius Martial

The mind has great influence over the body, and maladies often have their origin there. --Moliere

Confidence and hope do more good than physic. --Galen

Live in rooms full of light
Avoid heavy food
Be moderate in the drinking of wine
Take massage, baths, exercise, and gymnastics
Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water
Change surroundings and take long journeys
Strictly avoid frightening ideas
Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements
Listen to music.
--A. Cornelius Celsus

My inner advisor is dying to heal me. --Astrid Alauda

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.  Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. --Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1977

Half the modern drugs could well be thrown out the window, except that the birds might eat them. --Martin H. Fischer

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself! --Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia

Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful. --Denis Diderot

Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live.  But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better. --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Over the Teacups, 1891

First need in the reform of hospital management?  That's easy!  The death of all dietitians, and the resurrection of a French chef. --Martin H. Fischer

In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities hypochondria has always seems to me to be the only rational position to take on life. --John Diamond

He who has health has hope; and he who has hope has everything. --Arabic Proverb

A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. --Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Happiness lies, first of all, in health. --George William Curtis, Lotus-Eating

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer. --Clement Freud, The Observer, 27 December 1964

If you start to think about your physical or moral condition, you usually find that you are sick. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Proverbs in Prose

If you do everything you should do, and do not do anything you should not do, you will, according to the best available statistics, live exactly eighteen hours longer than you would otherwise. --Logain Clendening

It's no longer a question of staying healthy.  It's a question of finding a sickness you like. --Jackie Mason

Health is merely the slowest way someone can die. --Author Unknown

May you live as long as you are fit to live, but no longer! or, may you rather die before you cease to be fit to live than after! --Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1749

What linguistic genius
set up the sneeze and wheeze
To rhyme so very perfectly
with the word for allergies?
--Charlie N. Abbers

Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself. --Sydney J. Harris

My fat scares me - it's a ticking time bomb. --Carrie Latet

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat.  There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward. --John Mortimer

So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health. --A.J. Reb Materi, Our Family

Nothing is more fatal to Health, than an over Care of it. --Benjamin Franklin

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not. --Mark Twain