John Steinbeck on health

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

No one wants advice — only corroboration.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007Preface (p. xi)

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

Mark Twain1835–1910“Following the Equator: Pudd’s ahead Wilson’s New Calendar”, as quoted in Medicine in Quotations: Views of Health and Disease Through the Ages (2006), p. 146

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.

Marcel Proust1871–1922