“For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make.”

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.

There is no part of my life, upon which I can look back without pain.

The craving for ‘the return of the day’, which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.

I am not yet worthy; and I will live to deserve to be called a Trained Nurse.

The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health, or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.

There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions.

Woman has nothing but her affections,–and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.

The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.

I stand at the altar of murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.

The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea, have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea.

It is very well to say “be prudent, be careful, try to know each other.” But how are you to know each other?

Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity these, three and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Sometimes it’s the words we choose not to say that speak most loudly about our character.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.

I hate the idea of always having to interpret other people’s ideas and thoughts and words, because I’m very independent and, I guess, a free thinker.

Be honest about what you can get. To make a sacrifice and to get what you want you need to be very certain. In other words: always think about your objective, have a clear goal and commit to it from the heart.

I want my words to survive translation.

Don’t allow your actions to betray your words!