Quotes
The vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart - this you will build your life by, and this you will become.
The outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to reflect their inner beliefs.
In all human affairs there are efforts and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result.
He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.
Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bear bad fruit.
Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.
Circumstances do not determine a man, they reveal him.
As you think, you travel, and as you love, you attract. You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.
All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.
A man is literally what he thinks.
Was this an old disease, and, if so, which one? If it was new, what did that say about the state of medical knowledge? And in any case, how could physicians make sense of it?
This was certainly a logical assumption: soldiers and prostitutes, traditionally associated with sexual license and moral disorder, were among the first victims, and the connection became even closer when people noticed that the disease's first sores often turned up on the genital organs.
The public was appalled by this scourge. Physicians too, von Hutten reported, were so revolted that they would not even touch their patients.
The idea of infection began to be taken far more seriously than it ever had before. Hospitals transformed themselves in response to the new plague - sometimes for the better, but often for the worse, as when, in fear, they cast their ulcerated patients out into the streets.
Some cast the blame on supernatural powers - the planets, the stars, God, or even witches. Galenists claimed that the pox came from corrupted air, or even, like lovesickness, from an excess of black bile.
Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease began to make its way around the Old. The "pox," as it was often called, erupted with dramatic severity.
Sexual morality was becoming stricter, and prostitutes were usually condemned far more savagely than the men who used their services.
Regardless of its geographic origin, people quickly began to notice that the pox traveled from one person to another. They sometimes blamed transmission on common and morally innocuous practices - drinking from a common cup, kissing friends in church, following a syphilitic comrade on the latrine.
Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s.
Often, city fathers blamed prostitutes for the disease, and some threatened to brand their cheeks with hot iron if they did not desist from their vices.