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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.

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Most quoted on health:

You take care of your personal health because you want to live a long time, and you want to be happy. You want to be healthy. But we can't be happy or healthy if we don't take care of our life support system, the planet.

Sylvia Earle

The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment. Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all than you encounter.

Morihei Ueshiba Inspire! What Great Leaders Do (2004)

[I]f the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour?

Thomas Jefferson

Antony ... used to say that it behooved a man to give all his time to his soul rather than his body, yet to grant a short space to the body through its necessities; but all the more earnestly to give up the whole remainder to the soul and seek its profit, that it might not be dragged down by the pleasures of the body, but, on the contrary, the body might be in subjection to the soul.

Athanasius of Alexandria

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?

Charlotte Brontë

No one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength of his own to press forward with a due degree of watchfulness, and the great majority [of Christians] are kept down with such great weakness that they stagger and halt and even creep on the ground, and so make very slight advances.

John Calvin

Antony, however, according to his custom, returned alone to his own cell, increased his discipline, and sighed daily as he thought of the mansions in Heaven, having his desire fixed on them, and pondering over the shortness of man's life. And he used to eat and sleep, and go about all other bodily necessities with shame when he thought of the spiritual faculties of the soul. So often, when about to eat with any other hermits, recollecting the spiritual food, he begged to be excused, and departed far off from them, deeming it a matter for shame if he should be seen eating by others.

Athanasius of Alexandria

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. This is the way great spiritual giants are produced.

Swami Vivekananda

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Emily Dickinson Letter to T. W. Higginson (1870)

Candor is always a double-edged sword; it may heal or it may separate.

Wilhelm Stekel Marriage at the Crossroads (1931)

War is the health of the State and it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution.

Randolph Bourne The State (1918)

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination (1950)

It's not healthy for the country to have parties with polar opposite views without that bridge that you need to build consensus.

Olympia Snowe

The thing that really matters to me is well-being and happiness.

Jennifer Connelly

It has always been hard to measure poverty, because poverty is as much a state of mind as a condition of material well-being. Still, we seem to have made a bad situation worse.

Robert J. Samuelson

The health of the population (due to COVID-19 outbreaks) takes precedence over economic interest.

Jens Spahn Jens Spahn (2020)

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

Thomas Mann Tonio Kröger (1902)

Burying nuclear, chemical and solid Israeli waste poses danger to the environment and to people's health.

Mohammad Shtayyeh Mohammad Shtayyeh (2021)

And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying: 'Heal her now, O God, I beseech Thee.

Moses

If you heal yourself you can heal others.

Dolph Lundgren

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