50 The Best Epilepsy Quotes to Debunk Stigmas
Published July 9, 2023
Learn something new today with our epilepsy quotes.
More people across the globe are opening up about what it is like to manage this challenging condition.
Find out more with our epilepsy quotes below.
You may also enjoy reading these related articles:
What is epilepsy?
Epilepsy is a brain condition that causes repeated seizures, which temporarily change a person’s state of awareness and physical activity.
They can also impact the senses.
Check out these epilepsy facts below:
- Roughly 3.4 million people have epilepsy.
- 0.6% of children aged 0-17 have active epilepsy.
- About 1.2% of the total US population has active epilepsy.
What are the symptoms of epilepsy?
An epileptic seizure can be a frightening experience.
While there are many kinds of epileptic seizures, doctors generally put them into three different categories.
Focal seizures begin in an area or network of cells on one side of the brain.
This can take the form of tightening or jerking of muscles on one side of the body.
It can also result in the eyes and head moving in one direction and repeated chewing or swallowing.
Generalized seizures involve both sides of the brain from the start.
Therefore, these symptoms include jerking of the entire body, increased stiffness, and staring spells without blinking.
Finally, Unknown-onset seizures are episodes where we do not know where they start.
The symptoms may include all those listed above.
How do we treat epilepsy?
Doctors and specialists have several means of treating epilepsy.
For example, medical experts use EEG and MRI technology to analyze the structure of someone’s brain who may have epilepsy.
Sometimes doctors can mitigate seizures by treating other underlying problems that impact epilepsy, such as diabetes, brain tumors, or concussions.
Medicines are available that also help treat epilepsy.
All doctors recommend that people with epilepsy eat healthy diets, and some use implanted nerve-stimulating technology called neuromodulation.
In some instances, surgery to disconnect the part of the brain where seizures start is an option.
Epilepsy is a challenging condition, but people are not without options.
To learn more, check out our epilepsy quotes below.
Short epilepsy quotes describing an under-discussed condition
Check out these short and thoughtful epilepsy quotes.
1. “I run a race called epilepsy.” — Sagitarian Ricky
2. “Epilepsy is a disease in the shadows.” — Lynda Resnick
3. “Epilepsy gave her an adversity to fight against.” ― Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys
4. “Epilepsy is something nobody knows much about.” — Neil Young
5. “Do you get it? I have epilepsy, but it’s not who I am.” — Ray Robinson
6. “The ribbon is like a visual hug for someone with epilepsy.” — Mary Loughling
7. “There is such a stigma attached to epilepsy and seizures in general.” — Greg Grunberg
8. “Students with epilepsy should inform their teachers and professors about their illness.” — Iasmin Omar Ata
9. “When I had to have a little seizure, I looked up videos of people having seizures.” — Noah Schnapp
10. “Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.” — David Eagleman
The top epilepsy quotes about managing a debilitating condition
Epilepsy is hard on those who suffer from it and their loved ones.
11. “Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.” — Emile M. Cioran
12. “I encourage individuals with epilepsy to advocate for themselves and find a supportive doctor who will advocate for them as well.” — Natalie Boehm
13. “Autism reaches out in many different directions. It can be associated with language delays. It can be associated with epilepsy.” — Gerald Fischbach
14. “I feel so lucky that I met the love of my life. You know somebody`s in it to win it when you`re having a seizure, and they`re holding you.” — Kathleen Hanna
15. “Epilepsy can, in some circumstances, be enabling not just disabling through the stimulation and enhancement of artistic expression.” — Jim Chambliss
Epilepsy quotes and sayings to live by
Check out these epilepsy quotes from people who have been diagnosed with it.
16. “I’m important. I matter. I can do anything. I’m a sexy, strong woman that happens to have epilepsy.” — Ray Robinson
17. “We can fight seizures if we fight for our dreams every day and appreciate the little things we accomplish” — Rachel Scott
18. “There’s a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy.” — Ken MacLeod
19. “But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it’s divine.” ― Hippocrates
20. “I’m not only my spirit but my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?” — W. Somerset Maugham
Quotes about those living with epilepsy
Learn from the experiences of those living with epilepsy.
21. “If I reach a hurdle, stumble, and fall, I pick myself up, dust myself off and keep running the race until epilepsy exists no longer.” — Sagitarian Ricky
22. “Stage fright, like epilepsy, is a divine ailment, a sacred madness…It is a grace that is sufficient in the old Jesuit sense that is, insufficient by itself but a necessary condition for success.” — Charles Rosen
23. “I hid for many years my epilepsy despite being seizure free for years due to the fear I would lose my job and not be able to get my medication to survive.” — Natalie Boehm
24. “The doctor gave me several warnings: Never tell anyone unless necessary because I might be ostracized. Call it `seizure disorder,` not epilepsy, because fewer people would be frightened.” — Kurt Eichenwald
25. “I jumped and glanced over to see Kristof staring at Grady, who was waving his arms, rolling his eyes, shaking, and moaning. I think he’s possessed, I said. By what? Epilepsy?” ― Kelley Armstrong, No Humans Involved
The best epilepsy quotes for staying positive and making change
A positive attitude is key to managing any health condition we experience.
26. “The god of love, if omnipotent and omniscient, must be the god of cancer and epilepsy as well.” — George Bernard Shaw
27. “Hysteria, epilepsy, tuberculosis, and cancer were all found to result from the erratic propensities of a past life.” — Max Heindel
28. “There’s a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy.” ― Ken MacLeod, Descent
29. “My condition, epilepsy, is a brain disorder, not a disease. There’s a difference. You catch diseases. No one can “catch” epilepsy.” ― Marjorie Jackson, Being is Better
30. “Like MS or epilepsy, which were also once wrongly believed to be psychiatric disorders, ME is a neurological disease, and the World Health Organisation lists it as such.” ― Tanya Marlow
31. “There’s no guidebook on how to live life with epilepsy – but there are methods that can be applied in order to make navigating life with epilepsy a whole lot easier, and I post about these things because I want to help others achieve this in their own lives.” — Tiffany Kairos
Quotes about epilepsy to spread awareness
The more society learns about epilepsy, the better we can support those living with it.
32. “When people affected by epilepsy are reluctant to expose their condition, the public remains in the dark about it, a tragic irony that has made patient care and raising funds for research more than challenging.” — Lynda Resnick
33. “Of course, it took me knocking on his door in need of a warm place to sleep to get it that way, but one night on his sofa, where I’d suddenly developed night terrors and epilepsy, and that puppy was running like a Mercedes the next day. It was awesome.” — Darynda Jones
34. “But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.” ― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds
35. “You take somebody, one person has definitely got autism, you got another person that maybe has some of those traits, and maybe there’s some anxiety, depression, some epilepsy or something in the family history. Put them together; you’re more likely to have a severely autistic kid than if you don’t have any neurological problems in the family history.” — Temple Grandin
Sayings and quotes about epilepsy
Here are additional quotes about epilepsy.
36. “For centuries, epilepsy was the exact expectation of someone being possessed by the Devil. There was no better explanation, and it allows you to admit the existence of the Devil. If there’s a Devil, that mean’s there’s a God.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
37. “I’m not only my spirit but my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?” — W. Somerset Maugham
38. “Homeopathy has been of tremendous value in reversing diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, bronchial asthma, epilepsy, skin eruptions, allergic conditions, mental or emotional disorders, especially if applied at the onset of the disease.” — George Vithoulkas
39. “If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were “candles in the wind,” and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, and Lindsay Lohan is an electric toaster thrown intentionally into a Jacuzzi, then Paris Hilton is a strobe light in an epilepsy ward.” — Cintra Wilson
40. “I am very glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all of this, like great chess players who play sixteen games at once blindfold and die quite soon of epilepsy. Serve them right! I hope the Mathematicians, however, are well rewarded. I promise never to blackleg their profession nor take the bread out of their mouths.” — Winston Churchill
Famous epilepsy quotes from passionate people
Here are some epilepsy quotes from passionate people and organizations.
41. “There is a wide diversity of seizure types, epilepsy syndromes, outcomes, and etiologies.” — Epilepsy Foundation
42. “People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don’t have any idea what causes epilepsy.” ― Hippocrates
43. “I want people with epilepsy to know that there are ways in which they can play a role in their own recovery.” — Danny Glover
44. “It is a heterogeneous set of disorders with genetic and acquired etiologies better described as the epilepsies.’” — Epilepsy Foundation
45. “For some, epilepsy is a manageable chronic illness. Affected individuals have risen to the highest echelons of professional success.” — Epilepsy Foundation
46.“However, for others, epilepsy is a devastating and progressive disease leading to developmental delay, regression, and early death.” — Epilepsy Foundation
47. “Our scientific understanding of seizures and epilepsy has grown dramatically over the last decades, revealing that epilepsy is not a single disease.” — Epilepsy Foundation
48. “As scientists, we know that each increment in knowledge, every marginal gain, when added together, can make big differences to the lives of people with epilepsy.” — Professor Sameer Zuberi
49. “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things.” — Hippocrates
50. “I think the definition will change as we learn more, but my working definition of solving the brain is: one, we can model, maybe in a computer, the processes that generate things like thoughts and feelings, and two, we can understand how to cure brain disorders, like Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.” — Edward Boyden
Will we ever cure epilepsy?
Fortunately, doctors, researchers, and scientists remain optimistic that with new understandings of the brain and nervous system, we will unlock the cure for epilepsy.
Do you have a favorite epilepsy quote?
If so, be sure to let us know in the comments section below.
