Palliative Quotes & Sayings

I have learned that delivering the best possible palliative care to children is vital, providing children and their families with a place of support, care and enhancement at a time of great need is simply life-changing. — Kate Middleton

A paradigm shift of viewing palliative care or hospice as a gift instead of seeing it as giving up has the potential to change the way we experience advanced age. — Lisa J. Shultz

One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods. — Fay Weldon

The only real problem is a lack of love. To address the world's problems on any other level is a temporary palliative - a fix but not a healing, a treatment of the symptom but not a cure. — Marianne Williamson

Along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? The field of palliative — Atul Gawande

If I might suggest, sir - it is, of course, merely a palliative - but it has often been found in times of despondency that the assumption of formal evening dress has a stimulating effect on the morale. — P.G. Wodehouse

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures ... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it. — Sigmund Freud

It is the suffering of being that makes us seek out the other, as a palliative; we must go beyond this stage to reach the state where the simple fact of being constitutes in itself a permanent occasion of joy; where intermediation is nothing more than a game, freely undertaken, and not constitutive of being. We must, in a word, reach the freedom of indifference, the condition for the possibility of perfect serenity. — Michel Houellebecq

The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative. — Samuel Johnson

The dirty little secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psychopharmacopoeia is palliative. That is, all of them are symptom suppressors, and when you stop taking them you're back at square one. — Sally Brampton

Human beings invent myth, ideology, and religion as means of denying reality and replacing death with palliative fantasies. Helplessness and death are blows to human narcissism. Human beings create illusions about themselves, lie to themselves as a means to feel secure and less vulnerable. — Jerry Piven

I've rarely gotten a good review in my life, yet, to paraphrase Noel Coward, I am happy to console myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success. — Steven Weber

Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me -to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction- that in the infinitue run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child names Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. — Vladimir Nabokov

For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix. — Penelope Lively

In Our Underachieving Colleges, [Derek] Bok acts as both diagnostician and healer, wielding social-science statistics and professional studies to trace the etiology of today's illnesses and to recommend palliative treatments for what he has discovered. — Donald Kagan

I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly "done," there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors for the extremely aged. Big art pictures books and music. EXTREME palliative care, for when you've had it with everything else: the x-rays, the MRIs, the boring food, and the pills that don't do anything at all. Would that be so bad? — Roz Chast

Rather than thinking about exceptional moral rules for exceptional moral situations," Harvard's Dr. Lachlan Forrow, who is also a palliative care specialist, wrote, "we should almost always see exceptional moral situations as opportunities for us to show exceptionally deep commitment to our deepest moral values. — Sheri Fink

The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd. — Theodor Mommsen

The best way to convey meaning is to tell people what the information means to you yourself, he said. And he gave me three words to use to do that. "I am worried," I told Douglass. — Atul Gawande

I am interested in the way advances in medicine and palliative care mean more people now have the opportunity to plan their own deaths, and also plan for those who are left behind. What does that do to the grieving process? — Laura Wade

Comedy is the most palliative way to make a point. People are more willing to listen if they can laugh. — Judy Gold

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy. — Peter De Vries

One obvious palliative of the evils of democracy in its present form would be to encourage much more publicity and initiative on the part of civil servants. They ought to have the right, and, on occasion, the duty, to frame Bills in their own names, and set forth publicly the arguments in their favor. — Bertrand Russell

In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go. — Ursula K. Le Guin

enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? The field of palliative care emerged over recent — Atul Gawande

The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly. — Margaret Atwood

Materialism is a conviction based not upon evidence or logic but upon what Carl Sagan (speaking of another kind of faith) called a "deep-seated need to believe." Considered purely as a rational philosophy, it has little to recommend it; but as an emotional sedative, what Czeslaw Milosz liked to call the opiate of unbelief, it offers a refuge from so many elaborate perplexities, so many arduous spiritual exertions, so many trying intellectual and moral problems, so many exhausting expressions of hope or fear, charity or remorse. In this sense, it should be classified as one of those religions of consolation whose purpose is not to engage the mind or will with the mysteries of being but merely to provide a palliative for existential grievances and private disappointments. Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy. — David Bentley Hart

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death. — Nicolas Chamfort

Cynical as it may seem, easy credit has been used as a palliative throughout history by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class directly. — Raghuram G. Rajan

But the fact that, by 2012, one in thirty-five Dutch people sought assisted suicide at their death is not a measure of success. It is a measure of failure. Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end. The Dutch have been slower than others to develop palliative care programs that might provide for it. One reason, perhaps, is that their system of assisted death may have reinforced beliefs that reducing suffering and improving lives through other means is not feasible when one becomes debilitated or seriously ill. — Atul Gawande

What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life. — Hermann Hesse

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics. — Orhan Pamuk

A theory of everything is a palliative story just like reality was in The Matrix. Something we tell ourselves in order to armor ourselves from the frightening reality of how mediocre and pathetic we really are. While — James McGirk

If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic. — Ann Druyan

Love is not the mere opening of two souls' doors. Nor is it a palliative to the troubled heart; it is a stimulant. Under its influence, that heart grows until each tiny imperfection is not tiny. — Richard Harvell

Around-the-clock support is crucial for children receiving palliative care. They and their families often need help every hour of every day, both in hospices and at home. — Kate Middleton

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. — Vladimir Nabokov

Quantum mechanics, with its leap into statistics, has been a mere palliative for our ignorance — Rene Thom

Medicine is only palliative. For behind disease lies the cause and this cause NO DRUG can reach. — Silas Weir Mitchell

First-class delivery of children's palliative care is life-changing. When families are confronted with the shattering news that their children have a life-limiting condition, their world can fall apart. — Kate Middleton

Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul. In ancient times, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us. — Asghar Abbas

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. — C.S. Lewis

I believe we should support people to live, and I am therefore in favour of good quality palliative care. — Nicola Sturgeon