Best Florence Nightingale Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. People have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.

Florence Nightingale

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. I attribute my success to this: - I never gave or took an excuse.

Florence Nightingale

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.

Florence Nightingale

#11. 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.

Elizabeth Blackwell

#12. A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.

Florence Nightingale

#13. No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me.

Florence Nightingale

#14. Nursing is a progressive art such that to stand still is to go backwards.

Florence Nightingale

#15. For the sick it is important to have the best.

Florence Nightingale

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

Florence Nightingale

#17. I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small.

Florence Nightingale

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. How many bones did he set?" I cared about it much less than they did. It's my Florence Nightingale calm, I suppose.
There was a pause.
"Twenty-seven," said Father.
There was a question mark in that pause. "How many bones are in the hand?"
Another pause.
"Twenty-seven," said Eldric.

Franny Billingsley

#22. 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

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

Florence Nightingale

#24. 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

#25. Remember my name
you'll be screaming it later.

Florence Nightingale

#26. You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.

Florence Nightingale

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.

Florence Nightingale

#30. 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

#31. Diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.

Florence Nightingale

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

Florence Nightingale

#33. That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.

Florence Nightingale

#34. There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions

Florence Nightingale