Hippocrates Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art.

Hippocrates
Philiscus... too to bed on the first day of acute fever.... About the middle of the sixth day he died. The respiration throughout, like that of a person recollecting himself.

Hippocrates
Male and female have the power to fuse into one solid, both because both are nourished in both and because soul is the same thing in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.

Hippocrates
And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge holding such things to be holy secrets.

Hippocrates
Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.

Hippocrates
The disease called Sacred appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has the natural cause from which it originates like other affections. Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder, because it is not at all like to other disease.

Hippocrates
Fat people who want to reduce should take their exercise on an empty stomach and sit down to their food out of breath.... Thin people who want to get fat should do exactly the opposite and never take exercise on an empty stomach.

Hippocrates
Even when all is known, the care of a man is not yet complete, because eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise. For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health.

Hippocrates
Timidity betrays want of powers, and audacity a want of skill. There are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant.

Hippocrates
When in acute fevers, pneumonia, phrenitis, or headache, the hands are waved before the face, hunting through empty space, as if gathering bits of straw, picking the nap from the coverlet, or tearing chaff from the wall — all such symptoms are bad and deadly.

Hippocrates
A wise man ought to realize that health is his most valuable possession.

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

Hippocrates
I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.

Hippocrates
It is better not to apply any treatment in cases of occult cancer; for if treated (by surgery), the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for a long time.

Hippocrates
All the most acute, most powerful, and most deadly diseases, and those which are most difficult to be understood by the inexperienced, fall upon the brain.

Hippocrates
Time is that wherein there is opportunity, and opportunity is that wherein there is no great time. Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity. However, knowing this, one must attend to medical practice not primarily to plausible theories, but to experience combined with reason. For a theory is a composite memory of things apprehended with sense perception.

Hippocrates
Sleep and watchfulness, both of them, when immoderate, constitute disease.

Hippocrates
Related to this is the surgery of wounds arising in military service, which concerns the extraction of missiles. In city practice experience of these is but little, for very rarely even in a whole lifetime are there civil or military combats. In fact such things occur most frequently and continuously in armies abroad. Thus, the person intending to practice this kind of surgery must serve in the army, and accompany it on expeditions abroad; for in this way he would become experienced in this practice.

Hippocrates
Idleness and lack of occupation tend—nay are dragged—towards evil.

Hippocrates