“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.”

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?

Starting a job and working hard is how to be successful.

That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.

Do not engage in any paper wars. You will convince nobody and arrive at no satisfaction yourself.

We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master.

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

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

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.

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.

[That form of] eloquence, the foster-child of licence, which fools call liberty. [Lat., Eloquentia, alumna licentiae, quam stulti libertatem vocabant.]

Men have presented their plans and philosophies for the remedying of earth’s ills, but Jesus stands alone in presenting not a system, but His own personality as capable of supplying the needs of the soul.

Remedies are more tardy in their operation than diseases.

Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

You are both my illness and my remedy.

If I told you about a land of love…would you swallow it as a remedy?

Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken without developing new evils requiring new remedies.