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.

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

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

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.

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

All diseases run into one, old age.

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

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.

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.

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