“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.”

Do not engage in any paper wars. You will convince nobody and arrive at no satisfaction yourself.

We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master.

Nursing is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.

The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organization do not permit them to act.

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.

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.

They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.

I didn’t make a film because I wanted a starring role. I made a film because I wanted to tell a story and I wanted to prove that I could direct.

Music stimulates within us direct experience of expanded reality

In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.

In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.

We have found a direct correlation between grit and positive emotions, but the fact that I have no evidence that grit is bad for you doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s always a possibility that in the future researchers will discover a downside to grit.

The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

When you are looking for corruption, you should look at the entire stratum of the society, while some forms of corruption are direct, others are indirect.