47 Overcoming Illness Quotes and Sayings

An illness of any sort can lead to significant challenges in life. From handling adversity to making a new situation for yourself, these overcoming illness quotes and sayings are perfect for getting you inspired.

“A best friend is the only one that walks into your life when the world has walked out.”

“A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.”

“A weak but steady throb lay beneath Kev’s searching fingertips. Win’s heartbeat…the pulse that sustained his universe.”

“At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.”

“Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”

“Cancer gave me an understanding of the point of all this. To survive.”

“Consider the redwood tree. When only a stump remains, the tree can nevertheless regenerate. Little sprouts shoot up from the buds of ancient, invisible roots and actually form a circle surrounding the old stump. This is a “cathedral circle,” and the survival of some of the buds guarantees that the redwoods do not die.”

“Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.”

“Embrace each challenge in your life as an opportunity for self-transformation.”

“Enemy number one was now the disease. It had a presence as solid as that of a person – I think all serious illnesses do.”

“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”

“Feelings are something you have; not something you are.”

“For a while she considered being ill, but she changed her mind…”

“He always thought that Touie’s long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite.”

“Hope doesn’t require a massive chain where heavy links of logic hold it together. A thin wire will do…just strong enough to get us through the night until the winds die down.”

“I am not afraid to die; I am only afraid of saying goodbye to you forever.”

“I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time.”

“I long to accomplish a noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.”

“I mean, that’s at least in part why I ingested chemical waste – it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself.”

“I seem to myself, as in a dream, an accidental guest in this dreadful body.”

“I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.”

“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”

“It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.”

“It’s normal to shy away from illness and death. It’s natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.”

“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

“Love is an illness which doesn’t have good nor recompense.”

“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live.”

“Nothing is more destined to create deep-seated anxieties in people than the false assumption that life should be free of anxieties.”

“Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didn’t want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didn’t feel so good today.”

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone.”

“Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.”

“People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most.”

“Regaining health is more difficult an objective then becoming ill. Becoming ill is a random act of ignorance and regaining health is an intentional effort in frustration.”

“Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.”

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life.”

“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

“Thank you, dear God, for this good life, and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”

“The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one.”

“The truth that many people never understand is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.”

“The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle — the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.”

“The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.”

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”

“There’s a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”

“To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.”

“Until you have stood in another woman’s stilettos, you will never begin to know the year of pain she felt breaking them in.”

“We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell.”

“We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.”

There are many routes you can take to change your own difficult situation around.