Great Throughts Treasury

"Since I was twenty-four there never was any vagueness in my plans or ideas as to what God's work was for me."

"Do you think I should have succeeded in doing anything if I had kicked and resisted and resented? Is it our Master’s command? Is it even common sense?… Who am I that should not choose to bear what my Master chooses to bear?"

"The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm."

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

"How very little can be done under the spirit of fear. "

"I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results. "

"Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion."

"So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself. "

"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."

"A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place."

"Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch."

"And so is the world put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts (which were meant, not for selfish gratification, but for the improvement of that world) to conventionality."

"For the sick it is important to have the best."

"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."

"For it may safely be said, not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses, but that without it we shall be useless with all our devotion."

"Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind."

"Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts - suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!"

"For what is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within'? Heaven is neither a place nor a time."

"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."

"Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended... to take in the whole sick population. May we hope that the day will come... when every poor sick person will have the opportunity of a share in a district sick-nurse at home."

"I can stand out the war with any man."

"I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse"

"I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel."

"I can expect no sympathy or help from (my family)."

"I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself."

"I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have."

"I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet — all at the least expense of vital power to the patient."

"I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause."

"If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything."

"Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement / they have only tried to be ''men'' and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men."

"It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs. Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure; nature alone cures. Surgery removes the bullet out of the limb, which is an obstruction to cure, but nature heals the wound. So it is with medicine; the function of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine so far as we know, assists nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing more. And what nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him."

"It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want."

"It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm."

"Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have preceded relapse, attack or death, and not assert that there were none, or that there were not the right ones. A want of the habit of observing conditions and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading."

"Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things grow by God's Law out of the smallest. But to live your life you must discipline it. You must not fritter it away in "fair purpose, erring act, inconstant will" but make your thoughts, your acts all work to the same end and that end, not self but God. That is what we call character."

"Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table."

"Let each person tell the truth from his own experience."

"No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this - 'devoted and obedient'. This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman"

"Let whoever is in charge keep this simple question in her head (not, how can I always do this right thing myself, but) how can I provide for this right thing to be always done?"

"Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore."

"Religious men are and must be heretics now— for we must not pray, except in a "form" of words, made beforehand— or think of God but with a prearranged idea."

"She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel."

"Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever."

"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; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts."

"One's feelings waste themselves in words. They ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results."

"Out of activity may come thought, out of mere aspiration can come nothing."

"Poetry and imagination begin life."

"People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. 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. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients, are actual means of recovery."

"Patriotism is not enough; there must be no hatred or bitterness for anyone."

"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."