82 Quotes by Dorothea Dix

A virtuous character is likened to an unblemished flower. Piety is a fadeless bud that half opens on earth and expands through eternity. Sweetness of temper is the odor of fresh blooms, and the amaranth flowers of pure affection open but to bloom forever.

The rose is the flower and handmaiden of love - the lily, her fair associate, is the emblem of beauty and purity.

With care and patience, people may accomplish things which, to an indolent person, would appear impossible.

They say, 'Nothing can be done here!' I reply, 'I know no such word in the vocabulary I adopt!'

The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.

Pleasures take to themselves wings and fly away; true knowledge remains forever.

All my habits through life have been singularly removed from any condition of reliance on others, and the feeling - right or wrong - that aloneness is my proper position has prevailed since my early childhood, no doubt nourished and strengthened by many and quick-following bereavements.

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

I must study alone, as I am condemned to do every thing alone, I believe, in this life.