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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth and promotes scrofula, rickets, etc., among the children. People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill, they cannot get well again in it.

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.

Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.

Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.

Every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day. If her face, too, so much the better.

Everything you do in a patient's room, after he is 'put up' for the night, increases tenfold the risk of his having a bad night. But, if you rouse him up after he has fallen asleep, you do not risk - you secure him a bad night.

God spoke to me and called me to His Service. What form this service was to take the voice did not say.

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.

If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease, but of the nursing.

Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God's law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.

Sick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish. They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.

The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

The most important practical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe - how to observe - what symptoms indicate improvement - what the reverse - which are of importance - which are of none - which are the evidence of neglect - and of what kind of neglect.

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.

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.

Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse.

I attribute my success to this:—I never gave or took an excuse.

Better to have pain than paralysis.

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift there is nothing small about it.

I attribute my success to this I never gave or took an excuse.

Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population.

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.

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

Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses. We must be learning all of our lives.

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.

Unless we are making progress in our nursing every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back.

Nursing is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said the finest of Fine Arts.

Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses....we must be learning all of our lives.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.