Foolish the doctor who despises the knowledge acquired by the ancients.

Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well. Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick, is to feed your sickness.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

Some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician.

The physician must have at his command a certain ready wit, as dourness is repulsive both to the healthy and the sick.

All disease begins in the gut.

Old people have fewer diseases than the young, but their diseases never leave them.