A Quote by Lewis Thomas

The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears.

Lewis Thomas

Quote Author

Lewis Thomas
American - Scientist
November 25, 1913 - December 3, 1993

The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace — a gift of God, a message from the unconscious.

M. Scott Peck

Our fears are those that cause cancer and those fears operate in the regions that the drugs we use to hide our fears is the most predominate feeling. Our minds cause our inner illness for the most part.

Steven Machat

The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.

Stanley Kubrick

If you don't have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business.

A. M. Rosenthal

To live without love, compassion, or any other spiritual value creates a state of such severe imbalance that every cell yearns to correct it. Ultimately, that is what lies behind the onset of disease; the body is sending a message that something lacking in the present—an imbalance existing somewhere—has given rise to highly visible, unarguable, physical symptoms.

Deepak Chopra

It is most often not our strengths, our courage or our successes that bring two human hearts together, but it is often our shared vulnerability, our fears and our common failures that make us one.

Stefanie Schneider

Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.

Margaret Atwood

My view is that our minds are incredibly powerful animals that are, during life, kept somewhat in check by the load of our bodies. Once that load is gone (or so some ancient texts teach us) the mind is like a horse off the tether. So the habits we get into here might have something to do with what happens to us afterwards. An exciting but harrowing idea, given the everyday state of my mind. But also hopeful, since that's something a person can work with.

George Saunders

He who fears death either fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if thou shalt have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm; and if thou shalt acquire another kind of sensation, thou wilt be a different kind of living being and thou wilt not cease to live.

Marcus Aurelius

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.

Novalis

Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.

Aurora Levins Morales

Many doctors spend their time looking For the symptoms of illness, Rarely acknowledging that illness is itself a symptom.

Margo Adair

We've left the moment. It's gone. We're somewhere else now, and that's okay. We've still got that moment with us somewhere, deep in our memory, seeping into our DNA. And when our cells get scattered , whenever that happens, this moment will still exist in them. Those cells might be the biulding block of something new. A planet or star or a sunflower, a baby. Maybe even a cockroach. Who knows? Whatever it is, it'll be a part of us, this thing right here and now, and we'll be a part of it.

Libba Bray

For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.

Rebecca Goldstein

The Marshals were founded when our nation was founded and from the earliest period, one of their key tasks has been apprehension. They are our fugitive enforcers in this country.

William Barr

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

Madeleine L'Engle

A Quote by Lewis Thomas

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