“When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind – with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?”

People have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.

By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it.

At present we live to impede each other’s satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?

A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God – to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.

Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

The amount of relief and comfort experienced by the sick after the skin has been carefully washed and dried, is one of the commonest observations made at a sick bed.

How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery.

Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God.

No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this-‘devoted and obedient.’ This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.

Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.

There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.

I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.

I just have an enthusiasm for life.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.