Quotes from Elizabeth Blackwell

The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

Methods and conclusions formed by half the race only, must necessarily require revision as the other half of humanity rises into conscious responsibility.

Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development.

Health has its science, as well as disease.

When life follows the course of our desires, it is easy to be swept along without thought.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel.

I must have something to engross my thoughts, some object in life which will fill this vacuum, and prevent this sad wearing away of the heart.

The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

None of us can know what we are capable of until we are tested.

When life follows the course of our desires, it is easy to be swept along without thought.

I am not the sort of person about whom stories are told. Those of humble birth suffer their heartbreaks and celebrate their triumphs unnoticed by the bards, leaving no trave in the fables of their time.

I awoke with a renewed understanding of why it is wise to retire to bed come nightfall. For evil thoughts take strength from the dark, while hope thrives in the light.

Every great legend is at its heart a tale of innocence lost, and perhaps that was the role I was destined to play.

In her eyes I saw the pain that comes from regrets that will never be lifted.

Most saw those walls as protection from danger, but I had recognized, somewhere deep in my soul, that not all threats came from without.

Do not be fooled by the fine manners. At court, enemies hide in plain sight.

But happiness, fleeting by nature, is often savored only after it has flown.

I, who so love a hermit life for a good part of the day, find myself living in public, and almost losing my identity.

Love, Hope, and Reverence are realities of a different order from the senses, but they are positive and constant facts, always active, always working out mighty changes in human life.

It is not easy to be a pioneer-but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.

I must have something to engross my thoughts some object in life which will fill this vacuum and prevent this sad wearing away of the heart.

I do not wish to give (women) a first place, still less a second one- but the complete freedom to take their true place, whatever it may be.