We are so fond of one another, because our ailments are the same.

I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.

I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.

The sleep of a sick man has keen eyes. It is a sleep unsleeping.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

There was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

Recovery was not to be seen as a smooth slope, but as a series of radical steps, each inconceivable, impossible, from the step below.

I was set apart, we were set apart, we patients in white nightgowns, and avoided clearly, though unconsciously, like lepers.

To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption.

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.

A human being sheds its leaves like a tree. Sickness prunes it down; and it no longer offers the same silhouette to the eyes which loved it, to the people to whom it afforded shade and comfort.

We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Can there be worse sickness, than to know that we are never well, nor can be so?

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.

Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them so many anatomies.

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunderstroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.