“For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make.”

No woman has excited “passions” among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me.

In a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut.

Religion was important to me. My family and I were very religious. I acctualy believe the work I did was a calling from God himself.

A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place.

Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.

Nursing is a progressive art such that to stand still is to go backwards.

Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.

Never give nor take an excuse.

It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.

Let whoever is in charge keep this simple question in her head (not, how can I always do this right thing myself, but) how can I provide for this right thing to be always done?

The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.

Our first journey is to find that special place for us.

Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter’s or sculptor’s work.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small.

Diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.

You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.

There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

Flowers are words even a baby can understand.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.