The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future – must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.
If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.
It is better to be full of drink than full of food.
Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.
There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy.
Where prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient’s belief.
A sensible man ought to think about that well being is the best of human blessings, and find out how by his personal thought to derive profit from his sicknesses.
He who does not understand astrology is not a doctor but a fool.
The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician. The physician is the servant of the art. The patient must cooperate with the physician in combatting the disease.
Timidity betrays want of powers, and audacity a want of skill. There are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant.
Sometimes give your services for nothing.
The dignity of a physician requires that he should look healthy, and as plump as nature intended him to be; for the common crowd consider those who are not of this excellent bodily condition to be unable to take care of themselves.
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment uncertain, and judgment difficult.
Wherefore the heart and the diaphragm are particularly sensitive, they have nothing to do, however, with the operations of the understanding, but of all these the brain is the cause.
Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joy, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears.
Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.
Sleep and watchfulness, both of them, when immoderate, constitute disease.
Those diseases which medicines do not cure, iron cures; those which iron cannot cure, fire cures; and those which fire cannot cure, are to be reckoned wholly incurable.
The art is long, life is short.
Those things which are sacred, are to be imparted only to sacred persons; and it is not lawful to import them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science.
Silence is not only never thirsty, but also never brings pain or sorrow.