Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Disease
The remedy is worse than the disease.
Bacon—Of Seditions. Buckingham—Speech in House of Lords, 1675. Dryden—Juvenal. Satire XVI. L. 31. Le Sage—Gil Blas. Bk. XII. Ch. VIII. Middleton—Family of Love. Act V. Sc. 3.
[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.
Burton—Anatomy of Melancholy. Pt. I. Sc. 2. Memb. 3. Subsect. 10.
Apoplexie, and Lethargie,
As forlorn hope, assault the enemy.
Du Bartas—Divine Weekes and Workes. Second Week. First Day. Pt. III. The Furies.
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.
Mary B. G. Eddy—Science and Health. Ch. XIV. 20.
That dire disease, whose ruthless power
Withers the beauty’s transient flower.
Goldsmith—Double Transformation. L. 75.
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.
Nath. Hawthorne—Scarlet Letter. Ch. X.
Against diseases here the strongest fence,
Is the defensive vertue, abstinence.
Herrick—Abstinence.
Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.
Hippocrates—Aphorisms. 6.
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. Ep. Bk. IV. 22. Seneca—De Clementia. Bk. II. 2.
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.
Pope—Essay on Man. Ep. II. L. 133.
But just disease to luxury succeeds,
And ev’ry death its own avenger breeds.
Pope—Essay on Man. Ep. III. L. 165.
O, he’s a limb, that has but a disease;
Mortal, to cut it off; to cure it, easy.
Coriolanus. Act III. Sc. 1. L. 296.
Diseases desperate grown,
By desperate appliance are reliev’d,
Or not at all.
Hamlet. Act IV. Sc. 3. L. 9.
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.
Henry IV. Pt. II. Act I. Sc. 2. L. 125.
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.
King John. Act III. Sc. 4. L. 112.
I’ll forbear;
And am fallen out with my more headier will,
To take the indispos’d and sickly fit
For the sound man.
King Lear. Act II. Sc. 4. L. 110.
Graviora quædam sunt remedia periculis.
Some remedies are worse than the disease.
Syrus—Maxims. 301.