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

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.

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.

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

The craving for 'the return of the day', which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.

Women never have a half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have 'no time in the day to themselves.' 1852

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.