Top 100 Florence Nightingale Quotes
#1. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#2. Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses ... we must be learning all of our lives.
Florence Nightingale
#3. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#4. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#5. What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they know a great deal.
Florence Nightingale
#6. Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.
Florence Nightingale
#7. By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it.
Florence Nightingale
#9. You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.
Florence Nightingale
#10. It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.
Florence Nightingale
#11. The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the aid of Statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service.
Florence Nightingale
#13. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#15. The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.
Florence Nightingale
#16. That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.
Florence Nightingale
#18. To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.
Florence Nightingale
#19. Unless we are making progress in our nursing every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back.
Florence Nightingale
#21. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#22. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#23. Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.
Florence Nightingale
#25. 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?
Florence Nightingale
#26. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#27. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#28. A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.
Florence Nightingale
#29. No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me.
Florence Nightingale
#30. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#31. Never speak to an invalid from behind, nor from the door, nor from any distance from him, nor when he is doing anything. The official politeness of servants in these things is so grateful to invalids, that many prefer, without knowing why, having none but servants about them.
Florence Nightingale
#32. Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.
Florence Nightingale
#33. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#35. It is very well to say "be prudent, be careful, try to know each other." But how are you to know each other?
Florence Nightingale
#36. Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God - to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness.
Florence Nightingale
#37. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#38. There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.
Florence Nightingale
#39. Patriotism is not enough, there must be no hatred or bitterness for anyone.
Florence Nightingale
#40. The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organization do not permit them to act.
Florence Nightingale
#41. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#42. Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.
Florence Nightingale
#44. Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.
Florence Nightingale
#45. [On Thomas Babington Macaulay:] He was a most disagreeable companion to my fancy ... His conversation was a procession of one.
Florence Nightingale
#46. 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 ... There is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea.
Florence Nightingale
#47. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#48. I cannot remember the time when I have not longed for death ... for years and years I used to watch for death as no sick man ever watched for the morning.
Florence Nightingale
#49. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#50. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#51. I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief ... All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it.
Florence Nightingale
#52. Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
Florence Nightingale
#53. Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever.
Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.
Florence Nightingale
#54. The 'kingdom of heaven is within,' indeed, but we must also create one without, because we are intended to act upon our circumstances.
Florence Nightingale
#55. Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.
Florence Nightingale
#59. The craving for 'the return of the day', which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.
Florence Nightingale
#60. Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.
Florence Nightingale
#62. The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.
Florence Nightingale
#63. For what is Mysticism? It is 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.
Florence Nightingale
#66. God spoke to me and called me to His Service. What form this service was to take the voice did not say.
Florence Nightingale
#68. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#69. I am not yet worthy; and I will live to deserve to be called a Trained Nurse.
Florence Nightingale
#70. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#71. May we hope that, when we are all dead and gone, leaders will arise who have been personally experienced in the hard, practical work, the difficulties, and the joys of organizing nursing reforms, and who will lead far beyond anything we have done!
Florence Nightingale
#72. I stand at the altar of murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.
Florence Nightingale
#73. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the object presented to patients are an actual means of recovery.
Florence Nightingale
#74. The night is given to us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power.
Florence Nightingale
#75. We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master.
Florence Nightingale
#77. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#78. Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
Florence Nightingale
#79. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#81. Women dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their
life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last.
Florence Nightingale
#82. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#83. Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God.
Florence Nightingale
#84. Passion, intellect, moral activity - these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilisation.
Florence Nightingale
#85. She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.
Florence Nightingale
#86. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#87. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#88. At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?
Florence Nightingale
#90. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#91. 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.
Florence Nightingale
#92. Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.
Florence Nightingale
#93. A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place.
Florence Nightingale
#94. Christ, if he had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer
Florence Nightingale
#95. Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity these, three and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?
Florence Nightingale
#98. Woman has nothing but her affections,
and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.
Florence Nightingale
#99. Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.
Florence Nightingale
#100. I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small.
Florence Nightingale
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