As if you would call a physician, that is thought good for the cure of the disease you complain of but is Bacon unacquainted with your body, and therefore may put you in the way for a present cure but overthroweth your health in some other kind; and so cure the disease and kill the patient.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.27,'Of Friendship'.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Ecclesiastes 7:8.

If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apttoteach; Not giventowine, nostriker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous.

-Bible (NewTestament)
  Timothy 3:1^3.

Beware the fury of a patient man.

-Dryden,John
Absalom and  Achitophel, pt.1, l.1005.

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  'The Love Song of  J  Alfred Prufrock' (first published in Poetry magazine, collected in Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917), opening lines.

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
Four Quartets,'The Dry Salvages', pt.3.

I have long held the notion that if a vet can't catch his patient there's nothing much to worry about.

-Herriot,James pseudonym of James Alfred Wight
  Vet in Harness.

It's like saying that the patient died but the good news is that he's eating less.

-Jacobs, Andrew,Jr
  Of the Reagan administration's claim to have reduced inflation. In the Washington Post, 6  Jun.

Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike.

-Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
  Evangeline, pt.2, section1.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

-Owen,Wilfred
  'Anthem for Doomed Youth'.

My soul; sit thou a patient looker-on; Judge not the play before the play is done: Her plot hath many changes, every day Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.

-Quarles, Francis
  Epigram, Respice Finem.

The most patient people grow wearyat last with being continually wetted with rain; except, of course, in the Scottish Highlands, where there are not enough fine intervals to point the difference. Stevenson

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
  An InlandVoyage,'Down the Oise: to Compi e' gne'.

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease.

-Voltaire pseudonym of  Fran c° ois Marie Arouet
Attributed.