Florence Nightingale Quotes

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

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

I can stand out the war with any man.

Bismarck was a large persian cat owned by Florence Nightingale.

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

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

[On Thomas Babington Macaulay:] He was a most disagreeable companion to my fancy ... His conversation was a procession of one.

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

In a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut.

Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.

Heaven is neither a place nor a time.

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 craving for 'the return of the day', which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.

Our first journey is to find that special place for us.

People have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.

Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape from this death and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced.

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

Christ, if he had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer

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

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

A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place.

Patriotism is not enough, there must be no hatred or bitterness for anyone.

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

Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.

The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.

For the sick it is important to have the best.

The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ.

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.

It is very well to say "be prudent, be careful, try to know each other." But how are you to know each other?

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

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.

Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity these, three and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?

At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?

A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.

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

Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.

I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital 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.

There is no part of my life, upon which I can look back without pain.

Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the object presented to patients are an actual means of recovery.

There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions

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

Do not engage in any paper wars. You will convince nobody and arrive at no satisfaction yourself.

I stand at the altar of murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.

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

I use the word nursing for want of a better.

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.

The night is given to us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power.

I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.

I am not yet worthy; and I will live to deserve to be called a Trained Nurse.

Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.

Never underestimate the healing effects of beauty.

Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.

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.

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

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

Woman has nothing but her affections,
and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.

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

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.

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

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

Remember my name
you'll be screaming it later.

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

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

Starting a job and working hard is how to be successful.

The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organization do not permit them to act.

Never give nor take an excuse.

The 'kingdom of heaven is within,' indeed, but we must also create one without, because we are intended to act upon our circumstances.