167 Quotes by Bernie Siegel

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

If you watch how nature deals with adversity, continually renewing itself, you can't help but learn.

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.

Compliments are the helium that fills everyone's balloon; they elevate the person receiving them so he or she can fly over life's troubles and land safely on the other side.

People have taught me what most doctors don't learn, in other words, when somebody does better than expected, the doctor will tell them they're doing very well and to keep it up. I learned to say, "You didn't die when you were supposed to so what's going on?", and they always had a story to tell me.

I decided to become a surgeon named Bernie who writes books and gives seminars to teach people what he has learned and is still learning about how to deal with life's difficulties.

To paraphrase something the anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said, the way I change my life is to act as if I'm the person I want to be. This is, to me, the simplest, wisest advice you can give anyone. When you wake up and act like a loving person, you realize not only that you are altered, but that the people around you are also transformed, because everybody is changed by the reception of this love....

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.

As one woman told me, "When I decided to come in to work happy, everybody around me became happy." This woman had decided to quit a job she hated, and on the last day of her two weeks' notice, she woke up happy. At the end of the day, she noticed that everybody around her was happy, too- so she didn't quit after all. She decided to come to work happy instead. Two years later, she's still on the job, radiating happiness and love.