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

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

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.

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.

If you don’t like what you’ve attracted, try not to point fingers at the circumstances. 

Don’t become a victim of external circumstances.

Circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.

A man is worked upon by what he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances will carve him out as well.

Acting is telling the truth under imaginary circumstances.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

Fortune may crowd a man’s life with fortunate circumstances and happy opportunities, but they will, as we all know, avail him nothing unless he makes a wise and vigorous use of them.