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

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

Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering... not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man.

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary nevertheless to lay down such a principle.

All disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed.

The account he gives of nurses beats everything that even I know of. This young prophet says that they are all drunkards, without exception, Sisters and all, and that there are but two whom the surgeon can trust to give the patients their medicines.

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.