Top 35 Bernie Siegel Quotes

When your heart speaks to you about what you need to do to sustain life on this planet, listen to it, make a difference, and be an inspiration for generations to come. Be inspired by people like Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Christopher Reeve, Albert Schweitzer, Helen Keller, and many others.

Mind-body medicine should not be an ‘alternative,’ nor should complementary and integrative medicine be something doctors are not exposed to during their training.

Medicine is a very tough thing. I mean, everyone is going to die. Sooner or later. That’s a tough thing to face.

I have always made a distinction between healing and curing. To me, ‘healed’ represents a condition of one’s life; ‘cured’ relates strictly to one’s physical condition. In other words, there may be healed quadriplegics and AIDS patients, and cured cancer patients who are leading unhealthy lives.

Love and peace of mind do protect us. They allow us to overcome the problems that life hands us. They teach us to survive… to live now… to have the courage to confront each day.

You can’t control the world, but when you control your thoughts, you bring order.

Patients want to be seen as people. For me, the person’s life comes first; the disease is simply one aspect of it, which I can guide my patients to use as a redirection in their lives. When doctors look at their patients, however, they are trained to see only the disease.

Part of my evolution has been to learn how painful most people’s childhoods are. They grow up not liking themselves, not loving themselves. Ask people if they were lovable the minute they were born, and watch them sit back and have to think about it. One lady said, ‘I suppose so.’ That’s painful.

Your body loves you, but if you do not love your life, it will end it far sooner, thinking it is doing you a favor.

I use music in the operating room to help create a healing environment for patients and staff. There is a reason that certain heart rates are healthy and certain beats of music heal and relax us.

I think some people do want to die, and they will get a disease. There are people who know their lives are so troubled, and their bodies are getting them out of here.

Physicians need to be good technicians and know how to prescribe, but for healing to occur they also need to incorporate philosophy and spirituality into their treatment. We need to feel as well as think.

Society should see parenting as a public health issue and help parents to bring their children up feeling loved. We have birthing classes, but no parenting classes. The latter is desperately needed if we are to avoid self-destruction.

An awareness of one’s mortality can lead you to wake up and live an authentic, meaningful life.

I truly feel the best doctors are ones who are criticized by nurses, patients and family. They do not make excuses and learn from their mistakes.

The thing you see in survivors is that they express feelings – I won’t say some of the things they tell their doctors, when doctors tell them they’re going to die in six months. Boy, do they let the doctor know how they feel about that statement.

I wish medical schools helped us to analyze our healthy and unhealthy reasons for becoming doctors.

We participate and are responsible for a lot of the things that happen to us. If you hate your job, you are much more likely to get sick and die at a younger age than someone who’s happy at work and has a nice family life and is mentally well adjusted.

When my body gets to the point where I can no longer function or feel gratitude, then I’ll leave it and become grateful again. But until then, I will appreciate what I have and not whine about what I don’t have. I will feel blessed by life and the opportunity to help others see that they are blessed, too.

I see people who die a few minutes after a doctor tells them there is no hope of a cure. They give up and go. Others get angry and find joy in proving the doctor wrong. Something within them is challenged and hopeful. Hope is the divine motivator.

Feelings aroused by the touch of someone’s hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith – all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well.

The question is not, will there be difficulties and threats to our existence, but how will we deal with them and what can we learn from them. How can they become blessings to society, as a life threatening disease is to an individual, by teaching us about the meaning of our life and existence?

I have learned to become not an M.D. but a ‘C.D.’ for the wounded people I meet. Yes, a ‘Chosen Dad’ who may not like their behavior but loves and reparents them and helps them to heal their lives and find self-worth and self-esteem and save their lives.

Parents, teachers, clergy and physicians change lives with their words. It is hypnotic for a child or patient to hear an authority figure’s words. As I am always sharing, ‘wordswordswords’ can become ‘swordswordswords,’ and we can kill or cure with either words or swords.

One of the best ways to change is to act as if you are the person you want to become. When you behave as if you are a different person, you change on a very basic level – even your physiology changes. When actors and actresses perform, their body chemistry is altered by the roles they play.

Inspiration is the greatest gift because it opens your life to many new possibilities. Each day becomes more meaningful, and your life is enhanced when your actions are guided by what inspires you.

If you talk to your body, it will listen.

God wants us to know that life is a series of beginnings, not endings. Just as graduations are not terminations, but commencements. Creation is an ongoing process, and when we create a perfect world where love and compassion are shared by all, suffering will cease.

I was called a ‘CD’ by a suicidal teenager, who is alive today because I became her ‘Chosen Dad,’ who loved her. We all have the potential to re-parent ourselves and others.

Traditional doctors say I’m a mystic. I don’t deny it.

Give someone who has faith in you a placebo and call it a hair growing pill, anti-nausea pill or whatever, and you will be amazed at how many respond to your therapy.

Life is a miracle, and we need to not fear trying to achieve our potential and reveal the remarkable creation we and all living things are and that our Creator has built into us the ability to induce self-healing.

A surgeon is surrounded by people who are sick, discouraged, afraid, embittered, dying – but also courageous, loving, wise, compassionate and alive.

There is survival behavior, and doctors need to learn from patients who do not die when they are supposed to, instead of saying, ‘You’re doing very well, so keep doing whatever you are doing.’ They should be asking what their patient is doing and pass the information to other patients.

If I were rewriting ‘Love, Medicine & Miracles,’ I might consider changing its title to ‘The Side Effects of Cancer.’ Healing is hard work, as is any change one must make in one’s life. I and others have learned, however, that the side effects of cancer may not all be bad ones.