“A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.”

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?

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.

No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this-‘devoted and obedient.’ This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.

Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.