Examining a patient in a tank respirator

Disease is an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism. It is often construed to be a medical condition associated with specific symptoms and signs. It may be caused by external factors, such as infectious disease, or it may be caused by internal dysfunctions, such as autoimmune diseases. In humans, "disease" is often used more broadly to refer to any condition that causes pain, dysfunction, distress, social problems, and/or death to the person afflicted, or similar problems for those in contact with the person. In this broader sense, it sometimes includes injuries, disabilities, disorders, syndromes, infections, isolated symptoms, deviant behaviors, and atypical variations of structure and function, while in other contexts and for other purposes these may be considered distinguishable categories. Diseases usually affect people not only physically, but also emotionally, as contracting and living with many diseases can alter one's perspective on life, and their personality.

Quotes

  • [Diseases] crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them as so many anatomies.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I, scene 2. Memb. 3. Subsect. 10.
  • 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.
  • The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. [...] While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases.
    • Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916), (ch V).
  • As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,
    Receives the lurking principle of death,
    The young disease, that must subdue at length,
    Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.
  • But just disease to luxury succeeds,
    And ev'ry death its own avenger breeds.
  • It may also strike you, my readers, as quite shocking when I tell you that there is no such thing, basically, as disease. There are instead only processes. What you think of disease is instead the result of an exaggeration or overextension of perfectly normal body processes. You are not attacked by viruses, for instance, for all kinds of viruses exist normally in the body. There are no KILLER viruses, then but viruses that go beyond their usual bounds.
  • O, he's a limb, that has but a disease;
    Mortal, to cut it off; to cure it, easy.
  • Diseases desperate grown,
    By desperate appliance are reliev'd,
    Or not at all.
  • This apoplexy is, as I take it, a kind of lethargy, an't please your lordship; a kind of sleeping in the blood, a whoreson tingling.
  • Before the curing of a strong disease,
    Even in the instant of repair and health,
    The fit is strongest; evils that take leave,
    On their departure most of all show evil.
  • I'll forbear;
    And am fallen out with my more headier will,
    To take the indispos'd and sickly fit
    For the sound man.
  • If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become a danger to themselves and others. These drugs, of course, simply keep you stuck in dysfunction. Their widespread use only delays the breakdown of the old mind structures and the emergence of higher consciousness. While individual users may get some relief from the daily torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented from generating enough conscious presence to rise above thought and so find true liberation. p.67
    • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997) p.67


Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 196.
  • The remedy is worse than the disease.
  • Apoplexie, and Lethargie,
    As forlorn hope, assault the enemy.
  • Disease is an experience of mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body. Divine Science takes away this physical sense of discord, just as it removes a sense of moral or mental inharmony.
  • That dire disease, whose ruthless power
    Withers the beauty's transient flower.
  • Against diseases here the strongest fence,
    Is the defensive vertue, abstinence.
  • Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.
  • D'ogni pianta palesa l'aspetto
    Il difetto, che il tronco nasconde
    Per le fronde, dal frutto, o dal fior.
    • The canker which the trunk conceals is revealed by the leaves, the fruit, or the flower.
    • Metastasio, Giuseppe Riconosciuto I.
  • Aëre non certo corpora languor habet.
    • Sickness seizes the body from bad ventilation.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, II, 310.
  • Vitiant artus ægræ contagia mentis.
    • Diseases of the mind impair the bodily powers.
    • Ovid, Tristium, III, 8, 25.
  • Utque in corporibus, sic in imperio, gravissimus est morbus qui a capite diffunditur.
    • And as in men's bodies, so in government, that disease is most serious which proceeds from the head.
    • Pliny the Younger, Epistles, Book IV. 22. Seneca the Younger, De Clementia, Book II. 2.
  • Graviora quædam sunt remedia periculis.
    • Some remedies are worse than the disease.
    • Syrus, Maxims, 301.
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