“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.”

Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape from this death and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced.

To understand God’s thoughts, one must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.

For what is Mysticism? It is not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within’? Heaven is neither a place nor a time.

Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.

The most important practical lesson than can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe.

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.

Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses, we must be learning all of our lives.

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.

I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

The night is given to us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power.

I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption.

Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius – the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!

Evil is… a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.