“Health is the greatest of human blessings.”

All diseases begin in the gut.

Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are developed from small daily sins against Nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear.

The dignity of a physician requires that he should look healthy, and as plump as nature intended him to be; for the common crowd consider those who are not of this excellent bodily condition to be unable to take care of themselves.

Physicians are many in title but very few in reality.

Old people have fewer diseases than the young, but their diseases never leave them.

Make a habit of two things: to help; or at least to do no harm.

Whoever wishes to investigate medicine should proceed thus: In the first place, consider the seasons of the year and what effect each of them produces.

Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand.

Sport is a preserver of health.

About medications that are drunk or applied to wounds it is worth learning from everyone; for people do not discover these by reasoning but by chance, and experts not more than laymen.

He who wishes to be a surgeon should go to war.

Things that are holy are revealed only to men who are holy.

The natural force within each of us is that greatest healer of all.

In all abundance there is lack.

I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.

The greatest gift for an individual or a nation… was abhaya, fearlessness, not merely bodily courage but absence of fear from the mind.

At my age, I’m just happy to be named the greatest living anything.

That was the greatest trick in music that people ever pulled off, to convince artists that you can’t be an artist and make money. I think the people that were making the millions said that. It was almost shameful, especially in rock n’ roll.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho.

I think the greatest rogues are they who talk most of their honesty.

Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.

At my age, I’m just happy to be named the greatest living anything.

God has opened many doors of opportunity throughout my lifetime, but I believe the greatest of those doors was allowing me to be born in the United States of America.