Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.

We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.

The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what's desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.

Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.

But planted in our flesh these valleys stand,
everywhere we begin to know the illness,
are forced up, and our times confirm us all.

They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die

Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than reality.

The fear of ill exceeds the evil we fear,
For so our present harms still most annoy us.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.

I feel there is some hideous new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting. Remoter parts of the world seem better now, because they are less touched by it. Control, bureaucracy, regimentation, these are merely symptoms of a deeper sickness that no political or economic program can touch. What is the sickness itself?