Great Throughts Treasury

"The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply."

"The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea, have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea."

"The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for— its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be."

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

"The most important practical lesson than can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe"

"The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower."

"The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health, or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick."

"The progressive world is necessarily divided into two classes - those who take the best of what there is and enjoy it - those who wish for something better and try to create it."

"The amount of relief and comfort experienced by the sick after the skin has been carefully washed and dried, is one of the commonest observations made at a sick bed."

"There is no part of my life, upon which I can look back without pain."

"To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose."

"To be in charge is certainly not only to carry out the proper measures yourself but to see that everyone else does so too; to see that no one either willfully or ignorantly thwarts or prevents such measures. It is neither to do everything yourself nor to appoint a number of people to each duty, but to ensure that each does that duty to which he is appointed."

"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."

"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."

"Volumes are now being written and spoken about the effect of the mind on the body -- I wish more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind."

"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.'"

"Women should have the true nurse calling, the good of the sick first the second only the consideration of what is their 'place' to do – and that women who want for a housemaid to do this or the charwomen to do that, when the patient is suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them."

"When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their 'tea,' you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about. ... [A] little tea or coffee restores them. ... [T]here is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea."

"Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe."

"You ask me why I do not write something ... .I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results."