“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.”

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.

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 day that each person willingly accepts himself or herself for who he or she is and acknowledges the uniqueness of God’s framing process marks the beginning of a journey to seeing the handiwork of God in each life.

You have to be willing to get happy about nothing.

The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate. Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred.

In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not keep the world from what it wants.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

Our Lord’s first obedience was to the will of his Father, not to the needs of men; the saving of men was the natural outcome of his obedience to the Father.

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.

When we are willing to stay even a moment with uncomfortable energy, we gradually learn not to fear it.