Hippocrates

"Just as food causes disease, food can cure it."

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."

"The patient is the physician's teacher."

"Idleness and lack of occupation tend inevitably to enmity and disease."

"It is more by any medicine that I have ever heard of that we might become wise."

"The sick who ask for help are half cured."

"Life is short, the craft is long, opportunity is fleeting, experience deceptive, and judgment difficult."

"Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases."

"There is no disease without change, and no health which is absolute stagnation."

"Man is composed of constant and incessant change."

"Whoever desires to begin the study of medicine must be possessed of the following advantages; a freeborn condition, goodness of parts, love of labour, retentiveness of memory, fondness of truth, kind disposition, love of honor, steadiness, love of mankind."

"One must attend in medical practice to the seasons of the year and to the age of the individual."

"Before you heal someone, ask him if he's willing to give up the things that are making him sick."

"The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words."

"Sleep and watchfulness, both excessive, are bad and bring disease."

"Those things which are sacred are to be imparted only to sacred persons; and it is not lawful to impart them to the profane until they have been initiated into the mysteries of the science."

"To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy."

"A physician without a knowledge of Astronomy has no right to call himself a physician."

"The effects which follow the taking of food upon the human body are plainly observed in no other way than by considering the operations of its properties."

"Medicine is the most distinguished of all the arts, though, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it and of those who casually judge such practitioners, it is now of less dignity than it ought to be."

"If someone wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is willing to do away with the reasons for his illness; only then is it possible to help him."

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

"The symptoms which the diseases produce are their voice and their revelation."

"Sickness is the vengeance of outraged nature."

"Strength is the gift of labor."

"Everything in excess is opposed by nature."

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."

"The art is long, life is short."

"Healing is impossible in the presence of fear."

"He who has a knowledge of things is not to be envied by him who merely has knowledge of words."