Religion was important to me. My family and I were very religious. I acctualy believe the work I did was a calling from God himself.

It is very well to say "be prudent, be careful, try to know each other." But how are you to know each other?

People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying His prayer, and so on; but if anyone attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.

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

Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited-though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air-of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.

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.

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