“A wise man ought to realize that health is his most valuable possession.”

The greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it

Even when all is known, the care of a man is not yet complete, because eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise. For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health.

If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.

Positive health requires a knowledge of man’s primary constitution and of the powers of various foods, both those natural to them and those resulting from human skill. But eating alone is not enough for health. There must also be exercise, of which the effects must likewise be known.

Wine is an appropriate article for mankind, both for the healthy body and for the ailing man.

Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present behind all the arts.

Opposites are cures for opposites.

The function of protecting and developing health must rank even above that of restoring it when it is impaired.

Science begets knowledge; opinion, ignorance.

Leave your drugs in the chemist’s pot if you can heal the patient with food.

I swear… to hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.

Life is short, the art long.

Primum non nocerum. (First do no harm)

The combination of these two things makes regimen, when proper attention is given to the season of the year, the changes of the wind, the age of the individual, and the situation of his home. If there is any deficiency in food or exercise, the body will fall sick.

Each of the substances of a man’s diet acts upon his body and changes it in some way and upon these changes his whole life depends.

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself holding such things shameful to be spoken about.