Florence Nightingale Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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
Conceit and Nursing cannot exist in the same person any more than new patches on an old garment.

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

Florence Nightingale
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
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.

Florence Nightingale
It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things to turn a woman into a good nurse.

Florence Nightingale
A nurse who rustles (I am speaking of nurses professional and unprofessional) is the horror of a patient, though perhaps he does not know why.

Florence Nightingale
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.

Florence Nightingale
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
Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.

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

Florence Nightingale
Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again — the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.

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

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

Florence Nightingale
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. He gave them moral activity. But the Age, the World, Humanity, must give them the means to exercise this moral activity, must give them intellectual cultivation, spheres of action.

Florence Nightingale
The symptoms or the sufferings generally considered to be inevitable and incident to the disease are very often not symptoms of the disease at all, but of something quite different-of the want of fresh air, or of light, or of warmth, or of quiet, or of cleanliness, or of punctuality and care in the administration of diet, of each or of all of these.

Florence Nightingale
The "dreams of youth" have become a proverb. That organisations, early rich, fall far short of their promise has been repeated to satiety. But is it extraordinary that it should be so? For do we ever utilise this heroism? Look how it lives upon itself and perishes for lack of food. We do not know what to do with it. We had rather that it should not be there. Often we laugh at it. Always we find it troublesome. Look at the poverty of our life! Can we expect anything else but poor creatures to come out of it?

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

Florence Nightingale
It seems as if the female spirit of the world were mourning everlastingly over blessings, not lost, but which she has never had, and which, in her discouragement she feels that she never will have, they are so far off.

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

Florence Nightingale
In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. … Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. … They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

Florence Nightingale
I had so much rather live than write; writing is only a substitute for living... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Florence Nightingale
To have no food for our heads no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing? If we have no food for the body, how do we cry out, how all the world hears of it, how all the newspapers talk of it, with a paragraph headed in great capital letters, DEATH FROM STARVATION! But suppose one were to put a paragraph in the Times, Death of Thought from Starvation, or Death of Moral Activity from Starvation, how people would stare, how they would laugh and wonder! One would think we had no heads nor hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of any consequence.

Florence Nightingale
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
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
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
Religious men are and must be heretics now — for we must not pray, except in a "form" of words, made beforehand — or think of God but with a prearranged idea.

Florence Nightingale
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
What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points — romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence.
These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels.

Florence Nightingale
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