Health

Day by day, in every way, I'm getting better and better. ~ Émile Coué

Health is a term referring to levels of functional or metabolic efficiency of living beings. In humans, it is the general condition of a person's mind and body, usually meaning to be free from illness, disease, injury or needless pain.

Quotes

Sickness is the first warning that we have made a wrong judgement. A healthy person is never unhappy. ~ George Ohsawa

Alphabetized by author

If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going. ~ E. B. White

Contact with the sun should be much sought after, and the vitalization that comes through its rays. The sun kills all germs and frees from disease. ~ Alice Bailey

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss. ~ Gautama Buddha

• Parents are being urged to keep children at home if they are unwell following a substantial increase in the number of w:gastroenteritis outbreaks in childcare being reported to NSW Health
  • Australia public health news [https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20220224_00.aspx Public health alert: Gastroenteritis outbreaks in childcare settings) (24 February 2022)

• The State shall direct its policy towards ensuring that there are adequate medical and health facilities for all persons
  • Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution The Lancet Nigeria Commission: investing in health and the future of the nation

• Realize the healing power of prana. The torpor of life is dispelled in the pure rays of the sunset.
  • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden, Book One, The Call, 138. (1924)

• That which is the most dear but least of all belonging to us is the best load to carry on the way. Song brings us health, and blossoms will heal wounds. Therefore, I say, happy are those who understand sound and color. From the very beginning the prophets have noted sound and color. The ancient instruction about the ringing of bells is full of meaning.
  • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book Two: Illumination, 108. (1925)

• Avoid uniformity, as to both place and work. Actually, uniformity accompanies that greatest fallacy, the concept of personal ownership. First of all, the slave of property loses mobility of spirit... How much new health there is in diversity of place and of labor!
  • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book Two: Illumination, 327. (1925)

• Some say that work can be fatiguing and even injurious to the health. Thus say lazy and inert people. Understand that work properly apportioned cannot in itself be fatiguing. One should understand how to effect a proper change of the group of working nerves, and then no fatigue can find access. Do not try to find rest in idleness. Idleness is but the microbe of indolence.
  • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book Two: Illumination, 336. (1925)

• When a physician prescribes a diversified treatment, time and opportunities are found to carry it out. In the same way one can find a rational change of work. This concerns all kinds of labor. It is sad to come upon that immobility of mind which impedes the work of the higher centers.
  • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book Two: Illumination, 336. (1925)

• People do not think enough about the natural environment. They are quite content with basic sanitary measures, and the essential foundations of life are overlooked. It is not possible to promote health without a proper understanding of psychic life... the association with those whose attention is focused upon illness can only intensify the fear of disease and aggravate their ailments. It would be good to remember the remedy of ancient times when sick people would go into seclusion and remain close to nature. This was done not only in cases of contagious diseases, but when the organism was in need of renewal. Even now, there are those who prefer to live in mobile homes or in tents. Of course, a collection of many tents in one place only replicates urban conditions, but the fact that people dream of and look for seclusion reveals a healthy instinct for the preservation and restoration of health. We transmit thoughts of health, but of health correctly understood. It is especially important to think about health now. Many people are aware that the destruction of the nervous system has reached an extreme point. They understand that progress is impossible on this path of decay, but only a few know the significance of health in its full sense.
  • Agni Yoga, Supermundane I, 340, (1938) 340.

• It is not psychology with its indifferent analysis that is needed, but enlightened striving toward the restoration of health. There are many cases of city dwellers who take jobs as farm laborers to escape the sickening environment of the big cities. This is a praiseworthy decision if one knows how to avoid crowds in the new environment. Let us recollect various quests in which people sensed the need to change their unhealthy conditions. A longing for nature should be combined with psychic joy, otherwise the seeker will begin to weep at the first rainfall or other discomfort. The time will come when physicians understand that the human organism can fight diseases without outside help.
  • Agni Yoga, Supermundane I, 340, (1938)

• [T]he queen of heaven and earth, the provider of food, the stewardess of Enlil, the sweet breast satisfying all lands, the bringer of abundance, who can diagnose the intentions of the virulent asag demon and who checks people's bones; who examines the sinews of life and the sinews of death, comforting those joints; who knows every sick spot where there is affliction, torment or distress -- the kindly physician, the exorcist to the sick, who looks after the hearts of humans.
  • Anonymous, about the Babylonian goddess of healing Nintinugga, Nintinuga's dog, at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

• 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.
  
  • Anonymous nursery rhyme set to the tune of "Yankee Doodle", quoted in "The Health Club" in School Life, Vol. IV (January - June 1920), p. 17

• Contact with the sun should be much sought after, and the vitalization that comes through its rays. The sun kills all germs and frees from disease.
  • Alice Bailey, Letters on Occult Meditation, p. 334 (1922)

• The free use of salt sea bathing has a definite effect on the healthiness of the physical body. The water, incidentally absorbed through the medium of the skin and by the mouth, has a vitally prophylactic effect.
  • Alice Bailey, Esoteric Healing, p. 62 (1953)

• From one angle, disease is a process of liberation, and the enemy of that which is static and crystalised. Think not, from what I say, that therefore disease should be welcomed, and that the process of death should be cherished. Were that the case, one would cultivate disease, and put a premium on suicide. Fortunately for humanity, the whole tendency of life is against disease, and the reaction of the form life upon the thought of man, fosters the fear of death. This has been rightly so, for the instinct of self-preservation and the preservation of form integrity, is a vital principle in matter, and the tendency to self-perpetuation of the life within the form, is one of our greatest God-given capacities, and will persist. But in the human family this must eventually give place to... [viewing] death as the organised, freeing process...
  • Alice Bailey, Esoteric Healing, p. 14, (1953)

• 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, in "Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat" in No Poems: or Around the World Backwards and Sideways (1932).

• Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.
  • Gautama Buddha, Dhammapada, (verse 202), translator: Narada Maha Thera

• 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).

• Healthy does not mean "healthful." Healthy is a condition, healthful is a property. Vegetables aren't healthy, they're dead. No food is healthy. Unless you have an eggplant that's doing push-ups. Push-ups are healthful.
  • George Carlin, Brain Droppings (1998), p. 120

• Scarcely more than two generations had tasted the fruits of industrialization when the growth of population was still further accelerated by truly effective death control. The role of microorganisms in producing diseases was discovered. In 1865 the practice of antiseptic surgery began. It serves... as a reasonable demarcation of the beginning of an era filled with related breakthroughs in medical technology: hygienic practices, vaccination, antibiotics, etc. The total effect of this recent series of achievements has been to emancipate mankind more and more from the life-curtailing effects of the invisible creatures for which human tissues used to serve as sustenance. Like other prey species newly protected from their predators, we have been fruitful and have so multiplied that we have much more than "replenished" the earth with our kind.
  These achievements in death control re-channeled the effects of industrialization; they increased the rate at which human population could increase. More of the unprecedentedly rapid rise in apparent carrying capacity resulting from industrial drawing down of resource stocks was devoted to supporting population growth, and less was devoted to supporting enhanced living standards, than might otherwise have been the case.
  Death control was a real boon to the first three or four generations that experienced it. Increasingly, parents were spared bereavement during their child-rearing years, and people of all ages were spared the suffering and debilitation that infectious diseases used to inflict. Fewer children became orphaned. Fewer adults became widowed in the prime years of life.
  But all these benefits helped us to overshoot permanent carrying capacity. For most people, as this was happening, "carrying capacity" remained an unknown phrase. The concept was absent from the paradigm by which people... perceived and understood their world. Industrialism had given us a temporary increase in opportunities-a very dangerous blessing. Death control gave us a further rapid increase in population not based on a further rise in carrying capacity. Thus, [...] mankind came into a really precarious situation.
  • William R. Catton, Overshoot (1980), p. 30-31.

• The most effective route to achieving optimal health is by channeling the intrinsic methods that the human body has developed during its hundreds of thousands years on Earth. Recommendations that drastically diverge from this pattern will likely lead to poorer health, which is indeed what has been witnessed over the past three decades.
  • Dr. Colin E. Champ, Misguided Medicine, 2nd edition (2016), Chapter 18

• Thank Him for health. Consecrate it as His trust to innocent enjoyment, manly effort, social usefulness, and preparation for an honorable and holy career.
  • William Ellery Channing, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 299.

• Cur moriatur homo, cui salvia crescit in horto?
  • Why should (need) a man die who has sage in his garden?
  • Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, line 177. Original and translation. pub. by Sir Alexander Chope (1830).

• There are more disorders of the mind than of the body, and they are of a more dangerous nature.
  • Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes (c. 45 BCE), Book III, Section III, p 93, translated by Charles Duke Yonge (1877 edition)

• Of all the garden herbes none is of greater vertue than sage.
  • Thomas Cogan, Heaven of Health (1596). Quoting from Schola Salerni, p. 32.

• Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux.
  • Day by day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.
    • Émile Coué, in his auto-suggestive formula for health, as quoted in The Practice of Autosuggestion by the Method of Emile Coué (1922) by Cyrus Harry Brooks
  • Variant translation: Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.

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

• Nor love, nor honour, wealth nor pow'r,
  Can give the heart a cheerful hour
  When health is lost. Be timely wise;
  With health all taste of pleasure flies.
  • John Gay, Fables (1727), Part I. Fable 31.

• 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 (1819).

• You must all advance by taking good care of your health. Only by taking good care of your health, you can gain success. The fact is that if your health is not good, how can you do your service? Taking care of your health is as important as any of the other duties of your life. It is your duty towards your body. If your body does not work, how will you function and advance?
  • Haidakhan Babaji, The Teachings of Babaji, 9 January 1984.

• A cool mouth, and warm feet, live long.
  • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651).

• He that goes to bed thirsty rises healthy.
  • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651).

• Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
  • Attributed to Markus Herz by Ernst von Feuchtersleben, Zur Diätetik der Seele (1841), p. 95. (more info).

• Christ's gospel could never have been delivered by one who was diseased.
  • John McClellan Holmes, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 299.

• There are three wicks you know to the lamp of a man's life: brain, blood, and breath. Press the brain a little, its light goes out, followed by both the others. Stop the heart a minute, and out go all three of the wicks. Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is soon stagnation, cold, and darkness.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), XI.

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

• The causes which affect human health are often obscure, many of them so subtile that they are discerned with difficulty, and can only be appreciated by those who devote their time to the study and observation of them through all their changes. They even sometimes escape the keenest observation of the most accurate observers; yet it is reasonable to suppose that those who prosecute such investigations with zeal actually make some progress in knowledge; and if any discovery of knowledge be made, it is not a matter of doubt that it should be employed to assure the public good. It is easier to preserve health than to cure disease, and it implies less expense of means.
  • Robert Jackson, (1854). "Suggestions regarding the appointment of inspectors of health in the army". The Lancet 63 (1592): 240-241. (communicated by J. Ranald Martin)

• With your talents and industry, with science, and that stedfast honesty which eternally pursues right, regardless of consequences, you may promise yourself every thing—but health, without which there is no happiness. An attention to health then should take place of every other object. The time necessary to secure this by active exercises, should be devoted to it in preference to every other pursuit.
  • Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (July 6, 1787); in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1955), vol. 11, p. 558.

• There is no greater goal than to truly improve Mr and Ms Everyone's health, as an innovator that is where I want to spend my energy.
  • Philippe Kahn NPR Interview January 2007, regarding innovative uses of the camera phone.

• How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself!
  • Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia (1833).

• ..act to protect the health and well-being of our employees.

Protecting access to the full range of reproductive health care, including abortion, is a critical business issue. Efforts to further restrict or criminalize that access would have far-reaching consequences for the American workforce, the U.S. economy and our nation’s pursuit of gender and racial equity.

• Levi Strauss & Co Levi’s Argues for Abortion Rights; Crowds Gather: Protest Update (May 3, 2022, 2:47 PM PDTUpdated onMay 3, 2022, 6:20 PM PDT)

• 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, in "An Ancient Cure for Modern Life" in Yoga Journal (January - February 2002).

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

• Sickness is the first warning that we have made a wrong judgement. A healthy person is never unhappy.
  • George Ohsawa, in Essential Ohsawa : From Food to Health, Happiness to Freedom : Understanding the Basics of Macrobiotics (1994), p. 77.

• Health consists with Temperance alone.
  • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733-34), Epistle IV, line 81.

• Will you touch, will you mend me Christ?
  Won't you touch, will you heal me Christ?
  Will you kiss, can you cure me Christ?
  Won't you kiss, won't you pay me Christ?
  

See my eyes, I can hardly see
See me stand, I can hardly walk
I believe you can make me whole
See my tongue, I can hardly talk.

See my skin, I'm a mass of blood
See my legs, I can hardly stand
I believe you can make me well
See my purse, I'm a poor, poor man.

• Jesus Christ Superstar, lyrics by Tim Rice (1970)

• In many countries there is now an interest in apiculture. Many more useful properties of bees are being discovered. The venom secreted by bees cures certain diseases. It is said that one or two stings by a bee cure the most chronic rheumatism.
  • Helena Roerich, Letters II, (7 May 1938)

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

• Healing is not a miracle. The Atonement, or the final miracle, is a remedy, while any type of healing is a result. The kind of error to which atonement is applied is irrelevant. Essentially, all healing is the release from fear. To undertake this, you cannot be fearful yourself. You do not understand healing because of your own fear. p. 3
  • Helen Schucman in A Course in Miracles, (1976)

• Without your will you cannot be rehabilitated. Motivation to be healed is the crucial factor in rehabilitation. Without this, you are deciding against healing, and your veto of my will for you makes healing impossible. If healing is our joint will, unless our wills are joined you cannot be healed. This is obvious when you consider what healing is for. Healing is the way in which the separation is overcome. Separation is overcome by union. It cannot be overcome by separating. p. 181
  • Helen Schucman in A Course in Miracles, (1976)

• Healing is the result of using the body soley for communication. Since this is natural, it heals by making whole, which is also natural. All mind is whole, and the belief that part of it is physical, or not mind, is a fragmented (or sick) interpretation. Mind cannot be made physical, but it can be made manifest through the physical if it uses the body to go beyond itself. By reaching out, the mind extends itself. It does not stop at the body, for if it does, it is blocked in its purpose. A mind which has been blocked has allowed itself to be vulnerable to attack because it has turned against itself. The removal of the blocks, then, is the only way to guarantee help and healing. Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working through the body, but not in it. p. 189
  • Helen Schucman in A Course in Miracles, (1976)

• Do not look to the god of sickness for healing but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him. When you acknowledge Him you will know that He has never ceased to acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgment of you lies your Being. You are not sick and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do. Remember, though, that to do this is blasphemy, for it means that you are looking without love on God and His creation, from which he cannot be separated. Only the eternal can be loved, for love does not die. What is of God is His forever, and you are of God. Would He allow Himself to suffer? And would He offer His Son anything that is not acceptable to Him? If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. Yet to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father is the acknowledgment of yourself as you are. p. 230
  • Helen Schucman in A Course in Miracles, Chapter 9, The Correction of Error, (1976)

• May be he is not well:
  Infirmity doth still neglect all office
  Whereto our health is bound.
  • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), Act II, scene 4, line 107.

• A new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health finds that unvaccinated children are far healthier than vaccinated children. As the rate of vaccination increases, so do chronic health issues such as asthma, allergic rhinitis, respiratory infections, eczema and a host of other health problems. The study, titled, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination” shows how childhood vaccination causes an increasing number of pediatric visits and an influx of diagnoses. The research followed 3,300 pediatric patients for ten years and was conducted at Integrative Pediatric, a pediatrics practice in Oregon run by Dr. Paul Thomas, M.D.
  • Kevin A. Storm, Ten Year Study: Unvaccinated Children Far Healthier Than Their Vaccinated Peers, December 2020

• 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).

• Ah! what avail the largest gifts of Heaven,
  When drooping health and spirits go amiss?
  How tasteless then whatever can be given!
  Health is the vital principle of [bliss]],
  And exercise of health.
  • James Thomson, Castle of Indolence (1748), Canto II, Stanza 55.

• Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.
  If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your here and now, and you can't remove yourself from the situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping all inner resistance. The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it. Only a surrendered person has spiritual power.
  • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997) p. 56

• The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness... To recognize one’s own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.
  • Eckhart Tolle]], A New Earth... (2005)

• Health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of: a blessing that money cannot buy.
  • Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653-55), Part I, Chapter XXI.

• If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.
  • E. B. White, in a letter to the New York Herald Tribune (29 November 1947).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 356-57.

• Health and cheerfulness mutually beget each other.
  • Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 387.

• When health, affrighted, spreads her rosy wing,
  And flies with every changing gale of spring.
  • Lord Byron, Childish Recollections, line 3.

• Homines ad deos nulla re propius accedunt quam salutem hominibus dando.
  • In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.
  • Cicero, Pro Ligario, XII.

• Health that snuffs the morning air.
  • James Grainger, Solitude, An Ode, line 35.

• Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.
  • Our prayers should be for a sound mind in a healthy body.
  • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), X. 356.

• Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady.
  • François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, No. 285.

• Pars sanitatis velle sanari fuit.
  • It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.
  • Seneca the Younger, Hippolyus, CCXLIX.

• Qui salubrem locum negligit, mente est captus atque ad agnatos et gentiles deducendus.
  • He who overlooks a healthy spot for the site of his house is mad and ought to be handed over to the care of his relations and friends.
  • Marcus Terentius Varro, De Re Rustica, I, 2.

• Gold that buys health can never be ill spent,
  Nor hours laid out in harmless merriment.
  • John Webster, Westward Ho, Act V, scene 3, line 345.

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

Attributed

• Tabi ni yande
  yume wa kareno o
  kakemeguru.
  • Fallen sick on a journey,
    In dreams I run wildly
    Over a withered moor
  • Matsuo Bashō, attributed in Kodansha encyclopedia of Japan, Volume 1 page 145 (see Google Books).

See also

• Exercise
• Food
• Immune system
• Nutrition
• Mental health
• Sunbathing
• Health care
• Social determinants of health