Selected Quotes by Florence Nightingale
“That “of His own good pleasure” He has” predestined” any souls to eternal damnation.”
Florence Nightingale, Belief
“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, Belief
“Woman has nothing but her affections,–and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.”
Florence Nightingale, Sex, Love
“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.”
Florence Nightingale, Sex, Goals
“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, Sex
“Nursing is a progressive art such that to stand still is to go backward.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.”
Florence Nightingale, Goals
“I did not think of going to give myself a position, but for the sake of common humanity.”
Florence Nightingale, Goals
“The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health, or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“Women should have the true nurse calling, the good of the sick first the second only the consideration of what is their ‘place’ to do… and that women who want for a housemaid to do this or the charwomen to do that, when the patient is suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“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, Work
"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, Science
"Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection."
Florence Nightingale, Science
“And what nursing has to do in either case is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
"There are no specific diseases, only specific disease conditions."
Florence Nightingale, Science
"If you knew how unreasonably sick people suffer from reasonable causes of distress, you would take more pains about all these things."
Florence Nightingale, Science
"The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply."
Florence Nightingale, Science
"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, Hope
"The craving for ‘the return of the day, which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light."
Florence Nightingale, Science
“What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization, and disorder on the part of the inferior… jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.”
Florence Nightingale, Anger and Fighting
“Starting a job and working hard is how to be successful.”
Florence Nightingale, Success, Work
“Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have no time in the day to themselves.”
Florence Nightingale, Life
“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, Belief
“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, Intelligence/Wisdom
“It is very well to say, “Be prudent, be careful, try to get to know each other.” But how are you to know each other?”
Florence Nightingale, Life
“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, Life
“I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act, and they make excuses.”
Florence Nightingale, Society
“People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying His prayer, and so on; but if anyone attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.”
Florence Nightingale, Belief
“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, Work
“To be “in charge” is certainly not only to carry out the proper measures yourself but to see that everyone else does so too; to see that no one either willfully or ignorantly thwarts or prevents such measures. It is neither to do everything yourself nor to appoint a number of people to each duty, but to ensure that each does that duty to which he is appointed.”
Florence Nightingale, Management
“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, Management
“But to live your life you must discipline it.”
Florence Nightingale, Life, Goals
“Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift — there is nothing small about it.”
Florence Nightingale, Life
“Patriotism is not enough, there must be no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”
Florence Nightingale, Goals
“Life is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling with the principle of evil, hand to hand, foot to foot. Every inch of the way is disputed. The night is given us to take a breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power. The day, to use the strength which has been given us, to go forth to work with it till the evening.”
Florence Nightingale, Life, Power, Strength
“Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.”
Florence Nightingale, Life
“Let each person tell the truth from his own experience.”
Florence Nightingale, Truth
“In it and in the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a petition. There is never a word of the theory that God’s dealings with us are to show His “power”; still less of the theory.”
Florence Nightingale, Belief
“Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses … we must be learning all of our lives.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“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, Work
“The best nurses have the essential qualifications before they go to school.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“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, Science
"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, Science
"People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. 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. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients, are actual means of recovery."
Florence Nightingale, Science
"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, Work
"Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion. Remember he is face to face with his enemy all the time."
Florence Nightingale, Science
“It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs. Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure; nature alone cures. Surgery removes the bullet out of the limb, which is an obstruction to cure, but nature heals the wound. So it is with medicine; the function of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine, so far as we know, assists nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing more. And what nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.”
Florence Nightingale, Science
“Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.”
Florence Nightingale, Science
“The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“To attempt to keep a ward warm at the expense of making the sick repeatedly breathe their own hot, humid, putrescine atmosphere is a certain way to delay recovery or to destroy life.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on the sick or the well.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“For the sick, it is important to have the best.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient, “because it is not her business,” I should say that nursing was not her calling. I have seen surgical “sisters,” women whose hands were worth to them two or three guineas a-week, down upon their knees scouring a room or hut because they thought it otherwise not fit for their patients to go into. I am far from wishing nurses to scour. It is a waste of power. But I do say that these women had the true nurse-calling—the good of their sick first, and second only the consideration of what it was their “place” to do—and that women who wait for the housemaid to do this, or for the charwoman to do that when their patients are suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
"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, Work
“For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“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, Work
“Every nurse out to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day. If her face, too, so much the better.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet-all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter’s or sculptor’s work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God’s spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.”
Florence Nightingale, Work
“The world is put back by the death of everyone who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.”
Florence Nightingale, Life, Death
“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.”
Florence Nightingale, Courage
“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, Belief
“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, Goals
“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, Opportunities
“A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. Rather, ten times, die in the surf heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.”
Florence Nightingale, Goals
“Remember my name … you’ll be screaming it later.”
Florence Nightingale, Success
“I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.”
Florence Nightingale, Success
“There is no part of my life, upon which I can look back without pain.”
Florence Nightingale, Life
“Ignite the mind’s spark to rise the sun in you.”
Florence Nightingale, Goals
“Never give nor take an excuse.”