A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties', forbid it. Her 'domestic duties', high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are but bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through), forbid it.

Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind, which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better understood than they were two thousand years ago.

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

Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter's or sculptor's work.

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

Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect.

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