Hormones, vitamines, stimulants and depressives are oils upon the creaky machinery of life. Principal item, however, is the machinery. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle? – Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories

Destroy the roots of the healthiest plants, their heads will droop and die. Many excellent qualities of the mind have their roots, in fact, in the body: their summits, which adorn the spiritual being, the mind, will wither, if we neglect the soil of these valuable plants… – C.G. Salzmann, Gymnastics for Youth: or, A Practical Guide to Healthful and Amus

Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together. – Charles Caleb Colton