Galen Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

Employment is Nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness.

Galen
The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

Galen
Diogenes compared them to fig-trees growing over precipices; for their fruit was devoured by daws and crows, not by men.

Galen
That which is, grows, while that which is not, becomes.

Galen
If anyone wishes to observe the works of nature, he should put his trust not in books of anatomy but in his own eyes.

Galen
For truly on countless occasions throughout my life I have had this experience; persons for a time talk pleasantly with me because of my work among the sick, in which they think me very well trained, but when they learn later on that I am also trained in mathematics, they avoid me for the most part and are no longer at all glad to be with me.

Galen
Praxiteles and Phidias... were unable to... reach and handle all portions of the material. It is not so, however, with nature. Every part of a bone she makes bone, every part of the flesh she makes flesh, and so with fat and all the rest; there is no part she has not touched, elaborated, and embellished.

Galen
He who has two cakes of bread, let him dispose of one of them for some flowers of the narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, and the narcissus is the food of the soul.

Galen
Diogenes the Cynic, it is related, was mighty of all people in regard to everything from self-control to endurance. He indulged in sexual lusts, not associating it with pleasure, an attractive good thing to some, but because of the harm that the retention of semen would cause if he avoided the habit of releasing it. When a prostitute who promised to visit him was delayed for some time, he rubbed his genitals with his hand, ejecting semen. After the whore arrived, he sent her away, saying: "my hand celebrated the wedding-hymn first." But it is clearly correct that, likewise, the disciplined man does not on account of pleasure indulge in lusts, but in order to relieve the hindrance acting as if this was not associated with pleasure.

Galen
It was, of course, a grand and impressive thing to do, to mistrust the obvious, and to pin one's faith in things which could not be seen!

Galen
The best physician is also a philosopher.

Galen
The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!

Galen
Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster

Galen
Diogenes received an invitation to dine with one whose house was splendidly furnished, in the highest order and taste, and nothing therein wanting. Diogenes, hawking, and as if about to spit, looked in all directions, and finding nothing adapted thereto, spat right in the face of the master. He, indignant, asked why he did so? "Because," Diogenes, "I saw nothing so dirty and filthy in all your house. For the walls were covered with pictures, the floors of the most precious tessellated character — and ranged with the various images of gods, and other ornamental figures."

Galen
Make it rather your serious endeavor not only to acquire accurate book knowledge of each bone but also to examine assiduously with your own eyes the human bones themselves

Galen