Top 40 Vivek Murthy Quotes

I am a big basketball fan. I have been watching basketball ever since I was a young boy.

Part of the reason people don’t talk about their loneliness is that they feel they will be judged for it.

We can experience an erosion of self-esteem when we’re lonely, as we come to believe that it’s because we’re not likable or because something is broken inside of us. And that can just compound that loneliness further and further.

When I went through my confirmation hearing to serve as surgeon general they asked me what my priorities would be and I didn’t list loneliness in that priority list because it was not one at the time.

Giving and receiving kindness are easy ways to feel good and to help others feel good too. People, organizations, and societies thrive when they are grounded in a culture of kindness.

I have long believed that there are fundamentally two forces or emotions that drive our decisions – love and fear. Love has its many manifestations: compassion, gratitude, kindness, and joy. Fear often manifests in cynicism, anger, jealousy, and anxiety. I worry that many of our communities are being driven by fear.

Climate change poses a serious, immediate and global threat to health.

I firmly believe that everybody in America needs a safe place to walk or to wheelchair roll.

If you use that time where you’re alone in ways that bring you joy and peace, then that solitude can have a really positive effect on your life.

I believe that inspiration is one of the most powerful forces in life. In career and in relationships, it’s worth searching for the path that inspires you. Pursuing such a path often entails risk – it may involve making a big change in what you’re doing – but the career risks we regret most are the ones we don’t take.

There are several factors in modern society that contribute to loneliness. One is that we are more mobile than we have been in decades past, which is fantastic in many respects, but also leads to us to move away from communities that we grew up with and got to know over time.

As all of us know, health is deeply intertwined with culture: what we eat, how active we are, how much we sleep. These are rooted in cultural norms.

We can’t underestimate the power that we have as individuals to provide the support that people need to provide that transition from a place of pain to a place of possibility.

My mother was from a middle-class background.

Whenever you have large numbers of people who are dying for preventable reasons, that constitutes a public health issue.

Emotions are a source of power, and that’s what science tells us. But many people I encounter have been led to think of emotions as a source of weakness.

Arranged marriages are ones where you got to learn who the person is after you actually get married, which can be challenging.

Our health care workers are the heroes of the Covid-19 response.

Sometimes when you get sick and you go to the doctor, it can feel like you didn’t get your money’s worth if you don’t come away with a pill. I’ve had many, many conversations with patients who I’ve cared for over the years about why it’s actually in some cases better not to go home with antibiotics.

Kindness is more than a virtue. It is a source of strength.

What you quickly realize once you commit to getting more sleep is it can increase your productivity, it can improve your mood. And that doesn’t just help you at work, but it helps you be the kind of person you want to be with your family and your friends and that’s ultimately what matters most.

I’m calling for a cultural change in how we think about addiction. For far too long people have thought about addiction as a character flaw or a moral failing.

Despite growing up in very poor circumstances, my father had big dreams.

It’s easy to say that health is all about personal responsibility and we should all make good decisions for ourselves, but the reality is far more complicated. We know that in the case of motor vehicle accidents, how other people drive makes a difference in how safe you are.

In fact, people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence rather than anything else. So it’s important that we not stereotype folks with mental illness.

We don’t do enough to help older people recognize how much they matter.

When I began my tenure as surgeon general, I did not intend to focus on emotional well-being.

I trained in internal medicine, and I expected most of my time would be spent on diabetes or heart disease or cancer. What I didn’t expect was that so many people I saw would be struggling with loneliness.

We live in a society where individual effort and progress is valued, and that’s absolutely correct and is as it should be. But we also are interdependent creatures. We can’t succeed solely on our own.

We don’t just want to eradicate illness. We want people to achieve their full potential.

I think of emotional well-being as a resource within each of us that allows us to do more and to perform better. That doesn’t mean just the absence of mental illness. It’s the presence of positive emotions that allows us to be resilient in the face of adversity.

Empathy has the power to bring together people who would otherwise never meet. It has the power to teach us and to reach us in moments of isolation when we think nobody understands.

The amount of sleep you get has an impact, not just on how you feel the next day, but it has an impact on your long-term health as well.

When it comes to our relationship with loneliness, specifically, it’s important to understand how our relative introversion or extroversion informs our preference for social interaction.

As prevalent as loneliness is, many people don’t recognize that people that they know may very well be suffering from loneliness. It’s important for many reasons, one of which is that it has a profound impact on health.

Service is a powerful pathway of getting out of loneliness. It takes the focus off of you and puts it onto someone else.

I do not intend to use the Surgeon General’s Office as a bully pulpit for gun control.

Emotional well-being is more than the absence of a mental illness. It’s that resource within each of us which allows us to reach ever closer to our full potential, and which also enables us to be resilient in the face of adversity.

With any sort of major change we need to make in our lives, it’s much easier to do it with other people. We succeed and thrive best when we work together and support each other. When we struggle alone, that’s when the struggle can seem impossible.

While loneliness has the potential to kill, connection has even more potential to heal.