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

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.

Religious men are and must be heretics now- for we must not pray, except in a “form” of words, made beforehand- or think of God but with a prearranged idea.

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?

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

Heaven is neither a place nor a time.

Nature alone cures. What nursing has to do is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.

If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease, but of the nursing.

For it may safely be said, not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses, but that without it we shall be useless with all our devotion.

I use the word nursing for want of a better.

Never underestimate the healing effects of beauty.

A girl, if she has any pride, is so ashamed of having anything she wishes to say out of the hearing of her own family, she thinks it must be something so very wrong, that it is ten to one, if she have the opportunity of saying it, that she will not.

I’m really small, so I think if I shrink, I’d turn into a puddle.

Tell me to calm down. Go ahead. Tell me I’m crazy. Tell me how it actually works. Try to make me feel small and insignificant. But I see you. For the insecure, power clutching man you are. Good luck. You need it.

I don’t like having people do little things for me.

Great opportunities are often disguised as small acts of service.

Do not limit the shape and size in which your miracle can come. Sometimes the smallest keys turn the biggest locks.

Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.

Be willing to take the first step, no matter how small it is. Concentrate on the fact that you are willing to learn. Absolute miracles will happen.

My mother often says that she could never have done it if I had been the youngest, if she had other small children she had to cart around New York City for my auditions and go-sees (modeling auditions) and stuff.