Lionel Trilling on health

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

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