When health, affrighted, spreads her rosy wing,
And flies with every changing gale of spring.
Health Quotes
Mahatma Gandhi has the most entries, then Thomas Jefferson, Paul of Tarsus and Athanasius of Alexandria. For sources, Addison’s Spectator (1711) has health and cheerfulness begetting each other, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1883) finds more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy, and John Muir’s The Yosemite (1912) says everybody needs beauty as well as bread.
“A room without books is like a body without a soul” is credited to Cicero and disputed. The notes say a 2011 post found the exact wording in an 1886 essay by Sir John Lubbock, who wrote that Cicero had described a room without books as a body without a soul. A line about dying of a misprint in a health book is credited to Mark Twain and marked misattributed, and a passage credited to Gurdjieff is flagged too.
Gold that buys health can never be ill spent,
Nor hours laid out in harmless merriment.
My body could stand the crutches but my mind couldn't stand the sideline.
It is a great thing to take a human body. Whoever comes to the earth must do work.
May be he is not well:
Infirmity doth still neglect all office
Whereto our health is bound.
Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady.