“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 time is come when women must do something more than the “domestic hearth,” which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

No woman has excited “passions” among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me.

In a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut.

Religion was important to me. My family and I were very religious. I acctualy believe the work I did was a calling from God himself.

A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place.

Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.

Nursing is a progressive art such that to stand still is to go backwards.

Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.

Never give nor take an excuse.

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.

Let whoever is in charge keep this simple question in her head (not, how can I always do this right thing myself, but) how can I provide for this right thing to be always done?

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.

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

For evil deeds may better than bad words be borne.

I generally have a real strong idea or a strong punchline, and I just try to get to it by rambling around, as I don’t like to memorize words.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God’s making it in reality.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

For deeds to die, however nobly done, And thoughts of men to as themselves decay, But wise words taught in numbers for to run, Recorded by the Muses, live for ay.