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

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.

Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses, we must be learning all of our lives.

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.

I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

The night is given to us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power.

I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ.

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary nevertheless to lay down such a principle.

The ‘kingdom of heaven is within,’ indeed, but we must also create one without, because we are intended to act upon our circumstances.

I cannot remember the time when I have not longed for death. For years and years I used to watch for death as no sick man ever watched for the morning.

I can stand out the war with any man.

Remember my name– you’ll be screaming it later.

For the sick it is important to have the best.

I was a little excited but mostly blorft. “Blorft” is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

Cuisine has become too complicated – this is about subject, verb, adjective: duck, turnips, sauce.

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.

The adjective ‘decent’ and the noun ‘government’ have seldom come together in the human history!

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.