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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Health

Health is the vital principle of bliss.

Thomson.

For life is not to live, but to be well.

Martial.

Health consists with temperance alone.

Pope.

Health and cheerfulness make beauty.

Cervantes.

  • Thou chiefest good,
  • Bestow’d by heaven, but seldom understood.
  • Lucan.

    Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy.

    B. Franklin.

    Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady.

    La Rochefoucauld.

    He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

    Arabian Proverb.

    Christ’s gospel could never have been delivered by one who was diseased.

    John McC. Holmes.

    Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute of exercise and temperance.

    Addison.

    What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health!

    Emerson.

    From labor health, from health contentment springs.

    Beattie.

    Health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil.

    Wendell Phillips.

  • Gold that buys health can never be ill spent,
  • Nor hours laid out in harmless merriment.
  • John Webster.

    Health and cheerfulness mutually beget each other.

    Addison.

    Health and good humor are to the human body like sunshine to vegetation.

    Massillon.

    In these days half our diseases come from neglect of the body in overwork of the brain.

    Lytton.

    There is no health; physicians say that we, at best, enjoy but neutrality.

    Donne.

    Health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of: a blessing that money cannot buy.

    Izaak Walton.

    The only way for a rich man to be healthy is, by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he was poor.

    Sir W. Temple.

    A sound mind in a sound body, if the former be the glory of the latter, the latter is indispensable to the former.

    Edwards.

    Health is the greatest of all possessions, and it is a maxim with me that a hale cobbler is a better man than a sick king.

    Bickerstaff.

    The fate of a nation has often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister.

    Voltaire.

    Gardening, or husbandry, and working in wood, are healthy recreations.

    Locke.

  • The surest road to health, say what they will,
  • Is never to suppose we shall be ill.
  • Churchill.

    Health is the soul that animates all enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless, if not dead, without it.

    Sir W. Temple.

    In health there is liberty. Health is the first of all liberties, and happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.

    Amiel.

    Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God, and value it next to a good conscience.

    Izaak Walton.

    Reason’s whole pleasure, all the joys of sense, lie in three words—health, peace, and competence.

    Pope.

    The root of sanctity is sanity. A man must be healthy before he can be holy. We bathe first, and then perfume.

    Mme. Swetchine.

    The requirements of health, and the style of female attire which custom enjoins are in direct antagonism to each other.

    Abba Goold Woolson.

    Infirmity and sickness may excite our pity; but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.

    Rousseau.

    Health is so necessary to all the duties as well as pleasures of life that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly.

    Dr. Johnson.

    Physic is of little use to a temperate person, for a man’s own observation on what he finds does him good, and what hurts him is the best physic to preserve health.

    Bacon.

    In the present day, and especially among women, one would almost suppose that health was a state of unnatural existence.

    Beaconsfield.

    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.

    Sterne.

  • The common ingredients of health and long life are:
  • Great temp’rance, open air,
  • Easy labor, little care.
  • Sir P. Sidney.

    One means very effectual for the preservation of health is a quiet and cheerful mind, not afflicted with violent passions or distracted with immoderate cares.

    John Ray.

  • Nor love, nor honor, wealth, nor power,
  • Can give the heart a cheerful hour
  • When health is lost. Be timely wise;
  • With health all taste of pleasure flies.
  • Gay.

    Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle at the onset.

    Lytton.

    In our natural body every part has a necessary sympathy with every other; and all together form, by their harmonious conspiration, a healthy whole.

    Sir W. Hamilton.

    The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician’s aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.

    Carlyle.

    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.

    Varro.

    The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one; 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.

    Emerson.

    Anguish of mind has driven thousands to suicide; anguish of body, none. This proves that the health of the mind is of far more consequence to our happiness than the health of the body, although both are deserving of much more attention than either of them receives.

    Colton.

    O blessed health! thou art above all gold and treasure; ’tis thou who enlargest the soul, and openest all its powers to receive instruction, and to relish virtue. He that has thee has little more to wish for, and he that is so wretched as to want thee, wants everything with thee.

    Sterne.

    Every man that has felt pain knows how little all other comforts can gladden him to whom health is denied. Yet who is there does not sometimes hazard it for the enjoyment of an hour?

    Dr. Johnson.

    Adam knew no disease so long as temperance from the forbidden fruit secured him. Nature was his physician; and innocence and abstinence would have kept him healthful to immortality.

    South.

    The morbid states of health, the irritableness of disposition arising from unstrung nerves, the impatience, the crossness, the fault-finding of men, who, full of morbid influences, are unhappy themselves, and throw the cloud of their troubles like a dark shadow upon others, teach us what eminent duty there is in health.

    Beecher.

    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 centers of flame, and all is soon stagnation, cold, and darkness.

    O. W. Holmes.

    Be it remembered that man subsists upon the air more than upon his meat and drink; but no one can exist for an hour without a copious supply of air. The atmosphere which some breathe is contaminated and adulterated, and with its vital principles so diminished that it cannot fully decarbonize the blood, nor fully excite the nervous system.

    Thackeray.

    There is this difference between those two temporal blessings, health and money: Money is the most envied, but the least enjoyed; health is the most enjoyed, but the least envied: and this superiority of the latter is still more obvious when we reflect that the poorest man would not part with health for money, but that the richest would gladly part with all their money for health.

    Colton.

    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.

    Sir Thomas Browne.

    Health is certainly more valuable than money; because it is by health that money is procured; but thousands and millions are of small avail to alleviate the protracted tortures of the gout, to repair the broken organs of sense, or resuscitate the powers of digestion. Poverty is, indeed, an evil from which we naturally fly, but let us not run from one enemy to another, nor take shelter in the arms of sickness.

    Johnson.