Quotes Relating to Health

You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating of flesh. I for my part do much admire in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds.

But we are nothing put out of countenance, either by the beauteous gayety of the colors, or by the charmingness of the musical voices, or by the rare sagacity of the intellects, or by the cleanliness and neatness of diet, or by the rare discretion and prudence of these poor unfortunate animals; but for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy. ¹

Morals, Plutarch 46 – 120 CE

---

Perseverance alone does not assure success. No amount of stalking will lead to game in a field that contains none.

I Ching (1000-750 BCE)

No amount of research will lead to better health outcomes if you are looking in the wrong field.

---

Socrates [Plato]: Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle.

Glaucon: But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their meal.

Socrates [Plato]: True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a relish–salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them.

Plato (428-424 BCE)
The Republic of Plato – Book II

---

You, (my meat-eating friends), put your health at risk – that’s your business. But animal-based diets put the land, the water, the air, a society’s collective health, and even our collective pharmaceutical resources at risk. That’s my business. That’s everyone’s business.

Do you realize that 75% of Americans call themselves environmentalists?
You don’t think that we could solve this problem in a heartbeat?
All we need is for the environmentalists to live what they profess – and we would be on a new course in the world.

Living as I do as a total vegan, gives me great joy that no animal has to die for me to live.

Howard Lyman,
Former cattle rancher, author of “Mad Cowboy” (1998)

---

Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.

Steinfeld, H. et al. (2006)
Livestock’s long shadow. FAO, Rome. 2006.

---

By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world. By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.

By respect for life, we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
German philosopher, physician, priest and musician
The Nobel Peace Prize 1952

---

Whenever people say “We mustn’t be sentimental”, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add “We must be realistic”, they mean they are going to make money out of it.

Brigid Brophy
British Author and Social Activist (1929–1995)

---

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.… The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Charles Darwin
Naturalist and author (1809–1882)

---

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

Leo Tolstoy
Russian novelist (1828–1910)

---

The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of real food for real people, you’d better live real close to a real good hospital.

Neal D. Barnard, MD
President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

---

About 2,000 pounds of grains must be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of grain eaten directly will support a person for a year. Thus, a given quantity of grain eaten directly will feed 5 times as many people as it will if it is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products.

M.E. Ensminger (1908–1998)
PhD Animal Agriculture

---

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

So I am living without fats, without meat, without fish, but am feeling quite well this way. It always seems to me that man was not born to be a carnivore.

Albert Einstein (14 Mar 1879-18 Apr 1955)
In a letter to Hans Muehsam, dated March 30, 1954

---

When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why then should man expect mercy from God? It is unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Writer and Nobel laureate in 1978 (1902–1991)

---

A dead cow or sheep lying in the pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher’s stall passes as food.

J. H. Kellogg
American physician (1852–1943)

---

It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures.

Violence begins with the fork.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

---

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German writer (1749–1832)

---

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Canadian-American economist (1908–2006)

---

Some people think the plant-based, whole-foods diet is extreme. Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that extreme.

Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn
US Surgeon and plant-based diet advocate since 1984

---

It is not your right — based on YOUR traditions, YOUR customs and YOUR habits — to deny animals THEIR freedom so you can harm them, enslave them and kill them. That’s not what rights are about. That’s injustice.

Gary Yourofsky
US Animal Rights Activist

---

You have to make a conscious decision to change [eating habits] for your own well-being, that of your family and your country.

Bill Clinton
US President (1993-2001)

---

I decided to pick the diet that I thought would maximize my chances of long-term survival.

Al Gore
US Vice-President (1993-2001)

---

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.

George Bernard Shaw
The Star, Apr. 5, 1890

---

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Author (1850-1894)

---

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Henry David Thoreau
Author of Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1817-1862)

---

The best doctor gives the least medicines.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. (1736)

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) 

---

I can resist everything except temptation.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Spoken by Lord Darlington in Lady Winderemere’s Fan (1892)

---

But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.

Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (1615)
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

---

He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave.

William Drummond
Academical Questions (1805)

---

Nobody else is responsible for your life but you.

Many people may be at fault for your pain and unhappiness. But no one else is responsible for digging you out of that pain or unhappiness.

Mark Manson Newsletter 17th November 2024
Mark Manson

---

Why growth is so hard. Growth requires loss – a loss of your old values, your old behavors, your old loves, your old identity.

Mark Manson Newsletter 17th November 2024
Mark Manson

---

Somebody Else’s Problem Field relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything that:

Life, the universe and everything (1982)
Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

---

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1982)

---

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (2002)

---

A learning experience is one of those things that says, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”

Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

---

I’d far rather be happy than right any day.

Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

---

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)

---

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

---

We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.

Douglas Adams
Life, the Universe and Everything (1995)

---

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Douglas Adams
Last Chance to See (1999)

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.

Douglas Adams
The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

---

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is “Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!”

Douglas Adams

---

The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing“.

Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

---

Oolan Colluphid is a fictional philosophical author who wrote the following trilogy of books.

Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

---

“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.

“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.

“But it’s burnt down?”

“Yes.”

“Twice.”

“Many times.”

“And rebuilt.”

“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”

“With completely new materials.”

“But of course. It was burnt down.”

“So how can it be the same building?”

“It is always the same building.”

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable, and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”

Douglas Adams
Last Chance to See (1990)

---

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

Albert Einstein

---

People with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Unskilled and Unaware of It – Dunning and Kruger (1999)

---

People don’t burn out from doing too much.

They burn out from doing too little of what matters.

The only thing worse than failing at something meaningful is succeeding at something meaningless.

Mark Manson Newsletter 8 December 2025

---

Last updated on Monday 11 May 2026 at 21:16 by administrators

Post Type: post

1. Plutarch (1878) Plutarch’s Morals. Vol. V. Little, Brown, and Company. [online]. Available from: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1215Opens in a new window.