It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air – there's the rub, the task.
– Virgil
Those who have learned by experience what physical pain and bodily anguish mean, belong together all the world over; they are united by a secret bond. One and all they know the horrors of suffering to which man can be exposed, and one and all they know the longing to be free from pain.
– Albert Schweitzer
If you are going through hell, keep going.
– Winston Churchill
Long is the way/ and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.
– John Milton, Paradise Lost
...cancer is only a word, like any other...The word reverberated...I gripped it in my mind's fist like a hot stone, unable to throw it far from me, letting it burn into my skin. I was angry. I wanted to hit people with it. Then, the next moment I wanted to make a prayer out of it, I wanted to write a poem with it...
– Rafael Campo
To wish to be well is a part of becoming well.
– Seneca
I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
– Audre Lorde
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
– George Eliot
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.
– Thomas Jefferson
I have given a name to my pain, and call it 'dog.'
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is what happens while you are making other plans.
– John Lennon
And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
– Abraham Lincoln
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.
– Robert Frost
The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
– William Hazlitt
What happens when my body breaks down happens not just to that body but also to my life, which is lived in that body. When the body breaks down, so does the life.
– Arthur Frank
...When we long for life without...difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.
– Peter Marshall
True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
– Charles Caleb Colton
Everyone who has ever built anywhere a 'new heaven' first found the power thereto in his own hell.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Hell is oneself; Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
– George Eliot
I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell . . you see, I have friends in both places.
– Mark Twain
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
– Antonin Artaud
...wherever you are is called Here,/and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,/must ask permission to know it and be known.
– David Wagoner
I walk down the street./there is a deep hole in the sidewalk./I fall in/I am lost...I am helpless/It isn't my fault/It takes forever to find a way out.
– Portia Nelson
I've looked at life from both sides now/ From win and lose and still somehow/ It's life's illusions I recall/ I really don't know life at all.
– Joni Mitchell
Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is.
– Norman Cousins
Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.
– Seneca
As I see it every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.
– Adelle Davis
A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.
– Hippocrates
One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick.
– Rabbi Harold Kushner
It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like.
– Jackie Mason
Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
– Dorothy Parker
The wish for healing has always been half of health.
– Seneca
Drugs are not always necessary, but belief in recovery always is.
– Norman Cousins
To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
– William James
Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
– Susan Sontag
Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is.
– Christiaan Barnard
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
– Dorothy Bernard
A healthy body is the guestchamber of the soul, a sick, its prison.
– Francis Bacon
An optimist is the human personification of spring.
– Susan J. Bissonette
In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
– Albert Camus
I only know that summer sang in me/a little while, that in me sings no more.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
– Aldous Huxley
Sooner or later, everyone is a wounded storyteller.
– Arthur Frank
My wound evokes your healer. Your wound evokes my healer. My wound enables me to find you with your wound where you have the illusion of having become lost.
– Rachel Naomi Remen
Walk carefully, well loved one/walk mindfully, well loved one,/walk fearlessly, well loved one./return with us, return to us,/be always coming home.
– Ursula LeGuin
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
...it is the story you have been writing/all of your life, where no Calypso holds you/ against your own willfulness,/where you can rise/from the bleak island of your old story/ and tread your way home.
– Michael Blumenthal
About OncoLink Contact OncoLink Privacy statement Disclaimer Link to OncoLink Home