Illness Perception Quotes

When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balance without the pneumonia, he is pronounced insane by all smart doctors.

I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness - that there is something wrong.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

The incurable ills are the imaginary ills.

I didn't think then, and I still don't, that I was actually sick.

Pregnancy is treated like an illness in some sections of our society.

Why is it that men who can go through severe accidents, air raids, and any other major crisis always seems to think that they are at death's door when they have a simple head cold?

The sage is not ill, because he sees illness as illness.

Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.

The surest way to health, say what they will, Is never to suppose we shall be ill; Most of the ills which we poor mortals know From doctors and imagination flow.

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!

Everybody knows how lazy he is. One day the neighbors saw Fang mow the lawn and I got three Get Well cards.

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.

One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

When our bodies are sick and people extend their sympathy, bring us soup, offer up solutions. When our minds are sick, people tend to shy away from you, be afraid, or call you outright crazy. I'm fascinated by the way society and individuals view mental illness, and most of my shorts comment on that.

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint - people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill - not well ... Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.

I cannot believe that my illness is natural. I suspect Satan, and therefore I am the more inclined to take it lightly.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

It seems to me that your doctor [Tronchin] is more of a philosopher than a physician. As for me, I much prefer a doctor who is anoptimist and who gives me remedies that will improve my health. Philosophical consolations are, after all, useless against real ailments. I know only two kinds of sickness--physical and moral: all the others are purely in the imagination.

Having cancer is one thing; looking like you have cancer is another thing. It's a disease that already takes so much.

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.