75 Positive Surgery Quotes To Help Reduce Your Anxiety and Speed Up Your Recovery

If you have a surgery scheduled, it can start a lot of negative thoughts in your head that will lead to anxiety. You may start to worry about bad things happening and imagine the worst case scenarios. The best way to avoid fear about surgery is to make sure you have all the important information from your medical professionals so you have all the information you need to know

The second important part is to have the proper mindset and manage your anxiety and your mental focus. That will help you decrease your fear and anxiety about your upcoming procedure. It is completely normal to experience this stress pre-surgery. Every single person that has had a procedure has experienced some of this. To help reduce your anxiety and have a speedy recovery we have gathered the best surgery quotes to help you get through the process.

Positive Surgery Quotes

1.”I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.” – Henri Matisse

2.”Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.” – Herbert M. Shelton

3.”Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so, I became a surgeon.” – Abraham Verghese

4.”Do I shock you? We are very playful here. It’s a good tone for an operating theater. It is a theater, after all.” – David Cronenberg

5.”With all due respect to my surgeon, in a perfect world he would be out of a job.” – Russ Ramsey

6.”If the operation is difficult, you are not doing it properly.” – Alberto Peña

7.”Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy.” – David Cronenberg

8.”What I’ve never understood is why some women use plastic surgery to make themselves more attractive to men. The most beautiful woman is someone who’s happy and is always smiling.” – Irina Shayk

9.”I am what I am. I’m not going to get plastic surgery. I had this discussion with my younger son. We were at a dermatologist, and this dermatologist suggested to me that I wanted to avoid wrinkles. Those wrinkles show that I have laughed a lot in my life, why should I want to erase that? Why would I erase the traces of my life which I loved?” – Barbara Sukowa

10.”Comebacks are not at all easy. After a major surgery, the difficult part is to conquer the inner demons. It’s all in the mind. Only an individual can overcome his fears.” – Rohit Sharma

11.”Plastic surgery can’t make you younger or more beautiful, because beauty is in your eyes, isn’t it? It’s in your soul; you can’t strap it on.” – Sarah Parish

12.”Getting older is baggage for so many people but I don’t spend time on things I can’t control. Wrinkles don’t scare me; they’re a part of life, and I will and do embrace them, but I look at surgery, and that scares me.” – Christy Turlington

13.”I’m having surgery today to have my face cleaned up. But it will take some fancy stitching to make me all beautiful again!” – Patsy Cline

14.”My dad’s a doctor, and when I was 8, I went to one of his medical conferences where they were demonstrating laser surgery on a chicken. I was so mad that a chicken had to die, I never ate meat again.” – Natalie Portman

15.”I haven’t had any plastic surgery – despite what people think, this is my nose. I have had Restylane and Botox, but I don’t think of that as plastic surgery anymore.” – Tom Ford

16.”I’m happy to tell you that having been through surgery and chemotherapy and radiation, breast cancer is officially behind me. I feel absolutely great and I am raring to go.” – Carly Fiorina

17.”The thought of somebody pulling and cutting around my face gives me stomach ache. Plastic surgery would be so painful. What if it doesn’t look good? What if they made a mistake? I couldn’t do it.” – Salma Hayek

18.”Modern surgery has been like a miracle to those who thought the pain was going to go on forever.” – Maeve Binchy

19.”After I came out of surgery – I was in the hospital for five weeks – I found that I gravitated toward very gentle sounds: chant music, solo bamboo flute sounds, a laid-back record of my own called ‘Inside.’ And the music became a very real part of my recovery process.” – Paul Horn

20.”As a medical doctor and cardiac surgeon, I had the responsibility of performing open-heart surgery on President Spencer W. Kimball in 1972, when he was Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.” – Russell M. Nelson

21.”Open-heart surgery is now part of a typical life experience for many people. Folks talk casually about ‘having a stent put in,’ as if they had their tires rotated.” – Roger Ebert

22.”I’ve had laser eye surgery and I don’t wear glasses anymore, so people just go, ‘You’re not Damien Hirst.’ I don’t get recognized on the street.” – Damien Hirst

23.”There are women who literally squeeze a baby out of their bodies or get cut open in major surgery, have a human being, the next generation of the human race pulled from their bodies, and within a couple of weeks have to go back to work, because if they don’t, they can’t pay their bills. Something’s wrong with that.” – Megyn Kelly

24.”I haven’t had any problems with my back since I got the foot surgery.” – Merle Haggard

25.”People said that I had liposuction surgery, but you tell me how can a man of 230 kgs lose weight only with a prick of a needle.” – Adnan Sami

26.”Ever since I got back surgery, everything in my life has been about reduction. I’ve got the lightest backpack I can carry and the lightest MacBook.” – Jim James

27.”I started running 3 miles every morning after throat surgery to remove a cyst last year. The gym used to be my adversary. But that has all changed. Now, I look forward to it every morning.” – Rachael Ray

28.”I came back after my surgery, throwing four to six miles harder than I did before.” – Curt Schilling

29.“My father is a big guy; he’s had a quadruple bypass surgery, and that’s scary. Those are real things that happen in families with overweight people, and I don’t want that.” – Chrissy Metz

30.”I’ve never had surgery. I don’t drink. I don’t go out. My shoulders, back, legs, hip, they’re all fine. I think I bring a lot to a team.” – Eric Weddle

31.”My fat cells have a memory like Einstein! I’m proof that surgery is not a magic potion. There are many ways to sabotage it.” – Carnie Wilson

32.”I had throat surgery. We had to check that out and make sure it wasn’t cancerous. I had a polyp on my vocal cord, so I had that taken out.” – Zakk Wylde

33.”I’m ticking things off my list: I had a tumor removed; I had spinal surgery; I had four surgeries in three months.” – Jennifer Grey

34.”Right now, after having had back surgery, I am finally back to running again.” – Frank Shorter

35.”What I’m trying to achieve with my surgery is my own personal satisfaction. It’s narcissism.” – Pete Burns

36.”Get a scalpel, and practice just, say, cutting a piece of meat or something like that. You sort of learn how you want to hold your fingers, and that sort of thing, and try to become graceful when you operate.” – Denton A. Cooley

37.”I came by the horror naturally. Surgery is the one branch of medicine that is the most violent. After all, it’s violent to take up a knife and cut open a person’s body and rummage around with your hands. I think I was attracted to the horrific.” – Richard Selzer

38.”I got the bill for my surgery. Now I know what those doctors were wearing masks for.” – James H. Boren

39.”I would like to see the day when somebody would be appointed surgeon somewhere who had no hands, for the operative part is the least part of the work.” – Harvey Cushi

40.”If a physician makes a large incision with an operating knife and cure it, or if he opens a tumor (over the eye) with an operating knife, and saves the eye, he shall receive ten shekels in money. …If a physician makes a large incision with an operating knife, and kill him, or open a tumor with an operating knife, and cut out the eye, his hands shall be cut off. If a physician heals the broken bone or diseased soft part of a man, the patient shall pay the physician five shekels in money.” – The Code of Hammurabi

41.”It is not always worth the discomforts of major surgery to get minor recovery.” – Richard Alan John Asher

42.”It is Surgery that, long after it has passed into obsolescence, will be remembered as the glory of Medicine.” – Richard Selzer

43.”So much goes into doing a transplant operation. All the way from preparing the patient, to procuring the donor. It’s like being an astronaut. The astronaut gets all the credit, he gets the trip to the moon, but he had nothing to do with the creation of the rocket, or navigating the ship. He’s the privileged one who gets to drive to the moon. I feel that way in some of these more difficult operations, like the heart transplant.” – Denton A. Cooley

44.”I don’t dawdle. I am a surgeon. I make an incision, do what needs to be done and sew up the wound. There is a beginning, a middle and an end.” – Dr. Richard Selzer

45.”In surgery, the healing process begins with a cut, an incision, the tearing of flesh. We have to damage the healthy flesh in order to expose the unhealthy. It feels cruel and against common sense, but it works. You risk exposure for the sake of healing, and when it’s over, once the incision has been closed, you wait. You wait and hope that your patient will heal. That you haven’t in fact, just made everything worse.” – Grey’s Anatomy

46.”300 Dollars that’s the price of living what? / Mommy I don’t like this clinic / Hopefully you’ll make the right decision / And don’t go through with the Knife incision.” – Nick Cannon

47.”Surgeons must be very careful when they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions stirs the Culprit – Life!” – Emily Dickinson

48.”As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it’s uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person’s chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it’s only by the grace of God that you get there.” – Mehmet Oz

49.”Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray.” – Rene Leriche

50.”Someday you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.” – P. J. O’Rourke

51.”I had a friend who was a plastic surgeon, so he would do little things. I never had, like, a full thing. So, I would go in maybe once every two or three years, and he’d do a little here, a little there; tweak you, like you tweak your car. Then I became the plastic surgery poster girl.” – Joan Rivers

52.”With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands – someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.” – Saul Bellow

53.”I’ve got nothing against plastic surgery at all. I know lots of people, young and old, who’ve had it. The point about good surgery is you can’t see it. The important thing is not to go crazy – and not to go to a bad surgeon.” – Suki Waterhouse

54.”Let me put it this way: I don’t plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can’t retire and do brain surgery – or at least he better not.” – Alan Furst

55.”My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, ‘The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do.’ Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father’s caliber–that kind of talent, that kind of ‘brilliance’ goes unheralded.” – Abraham Verghese

56.”While I worked as a surgery nurse at St. Thomas’s, I undertook private tuition to obtain certificates in anatomy, physiology, and chemistry. At the Sorbonne, I took honors in anatomy for two years, and the top prize in midwifery for three. I also studied for a brief time with Sir Joseph Lister, who instructed me in his techniques of antiseptic surgery.” – Lisa Kleypas

57.”A trained surgeon is also a potential killer, and an important bit of the training lies in accepting the fact. Your intent is entirely benign – or at least you hope so – but you are laying violent hands on someone, and you must be ruthless in order to do it effectively. And sometimes the person under your hands will die, and knowing that you do it anyway.” – Diana Gabaldon

58.”I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that’s happiness, I told myself.” – Norman Mailer

59.”And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.” – Richard Selzer

60.”At 10, I was intrigued by surgery, I wanted to be a surgeon for a long time. I love doctor shows and surgery shows. Blood is not an issue for me. I even took pictures once of me getting my blood taken.” – Jessica Biel

61.”Every eye is an eye, when you’re doing the surgery there that is just as important as if you were doing eye surgery on the prime minster or the king.” – Fred Hollows

62.”Supposing you’ve got an acute appendicitis. You’ve got to be operated on tonight. Would you like to have a surgeon who’s read some books of anatomy and knows how to do that operation – or would you prefer to have a surgeon who refused to read all books about anatomy and relied on his own instinct?” – David Ogilvy

63.”Greed plays a role in causing unnecessary surgery, although I don’t think the economic motive alone is enough to explain it. There’s no doubt that if you eliminated all unnecessary surgery, most surgeons would go out of business. They’d have to look for honest work, because the surgeon gets paid when he performs surgery on you, not when you’re treated some other way. In prepaid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform; hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations.” – Robert S. Mendelsohn

64.”Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything.” – K. Eric Drexler

65.”I felt that no boy should have to depend either for his leg or his life upon the ability of his parents to raise enough money to bring a first-class surgeon to his bedside. And I think it was out of this experience, not at the moment consciously, but through the years, I came to believe that health services ought not to have a price tag on them, and that people should be able to get whatever health services they require irrespective of their individual capacity to pay.” – Tommy Douglas

66.”You can’t treat an illness with cosmetic surgery, and that’s why it would be great if there were qualified therapists in plastic surgeons’ offices, and that people would go to a therapeutic meeting before plastic surgery. I think that should be part of the FDA requirement.” – Sharon Stone

67.”If the love of surgery is a proof of a person’s being adapted for it, then certainly I am fitted to be a surgeon; for thou can’t hardly conceive what a high degree of enjoyment I am from day to day experiencing in this bloody and butchering department of the healing art. I am more and more delighted with my profession.” – Lord Joseph Lister

68.”One of my surgical giant friends had in his operating room a sign “If the operation is difficult, you aren’t doing it right.” What he meant was, you have to plan every operation You cannot ever be casual You have to realize that any operation is a potential fatality.” – Joseph E. Murray

69.”The greatest discoveries of surgery are anesthesia, asepsis, and roentgenology—and none was made by a surgeon.” – Martin H. Fischer

70.”The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.” – Charles Darwin

71.”After the surgery I could barely stand up. It’s really frustrating having to take slow steps back.” – Connor Rabinowitz

72.”I separated my shoulder in practice and the three team doctors all agreed that I needed to have surgery. Ara was skeptical, so he sent me to a specialist in Chicago who told me to just leave it alone and the soreness will go away. I took his advice and it never bothered me again.” – John Huarte

73.”Well, the guy’s had open-heart surgery, He laid on that table and had them cut him open. And everything else. And he’s here playing football. That says something. You give the guy the benefit of the doubt that, hey, he’s tough enough to do this.” – Brick Haley

74.”I kind of went in with a goal. I had the surgery. It’s something I had to do. I looked at it like practice. I took it as serious as practice. At times, I had my ups and downs but I’m out on the field again, so obviously it paid off.” – Byron Tinker

75.“There was a time, probably about a year after my surgery and into my illness that I thought, wow, this is my life now. I won’t perform again.” – Colleen Dunn

If you’re having surgery, use these quotes to decrease your anxiety

Surgery is stressful, no matter how simple the procedure may be. Reducing your stress and the proper mindset can help you effectively get through your procedure and have a speedy recovery. Reducing anxiety will help you immensely. It is a fact that staying upbeat and positive about surgery results in better outcomes and will help you have a successful post-surgery recover. Print out the quotes above to keep by your side and help keep your attitude positive during the process.