What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.

For the sick it is important to have the best.

When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their 'tea,' you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about. ... A little tea or coffee restores them. ... There is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea.

I cannot remember the time when I have not longed for death. ... for years and years I used to watch for death as no sick man ever watched for the morning.

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 never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small...