Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.
The great secret of doctors is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
Why is there evil in the world? That is the supreme question of all religions and philosophies, and . . . the question “Why is there sickness?” is just another form of it. . . . Sickness and health are not simply physical states that the methods of science will eventually analyze completely and make understandable. They are rooted in the deepest and most mysterious strata of Being.
Life’s sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.
Who would imagine that someone could recover from a terminal case of cancer by receiving massive doses of radiation, or drugs first developed for chemical warfare, much less by watching funny movies? I have begun to suspect that . . . anything and everything can kill and heal, whether it is digitalis in heart medicine, a lover’s touch, or God’s grace.
The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta.
The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other.
Nothing in all nature is so lovely and so vigorous, so perfectly at home in its environment, as a fish in the sea. Its surroundings give to it a beauty, quality, and power which are not its own. We take it out, and at once a poor, limp, dull thing, fit for nothing, is gasping away its life. So the soul, sunk in God, living the life of prayer, is supported, filled, transformed in beauty, by a vitality and a power which are not its own.
The healthy, the strong individual, is the one who asks for help when he needs it — whether he’s got an abscess on his knee or in his soul.
As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe the only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.
The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself — but that force is not independent of the belief system, which can translate expectations into psychological change. Nothing is more wondrous about the fifteen billion neurons in the human brain than their ability to convert thoughts, hopes, ideas, and attitudes into chemical substances. Everything begins, therefore, with belief.
When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
All my life I’ve been a hypochondriac. Even as a little boy, I’d eat my M&Ms one at a time with a glass of water.
I am walking down the street in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue in the lower sixties, women with shopping bags on all sides. I realize with some horror that for the last fifteen blocks I have been counting how many women have better and how many women have worse figures than I do. Did I say fifteen blocks? I meant fifteen years.
Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to despise our being.
