Florence Nightingale famous quotes

I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Success

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

#Art #Hard Work #Nursing

Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things grow by God's Law out of the smallest. But to live your life you must discipline it. You must not fritter it away in "fair purpose, erring act, inconstant will" but make your thoughts, your acts, all work to the same end and that end, not self but God. That is what we call character.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Character #Self #Law

The most important practical lesson than can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Nurse #Important #Lessons

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

#Art #Nursing #Progressive

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

#Fear #Done #Littles

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

#Women #Nursing #Opportunity

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

#Nursing #Years #Nurse

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Science #Nursing #Thinking

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

#Light #Color #Littles

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

#Religion #Doe #Destruction

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.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Sacrifice #Nursing #World

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

#Jesus #Prayer #Real

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

#Two #Medicine #Nurse

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

#Expectations #Waiting #Care

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

#Hero #Nurse #World

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

#Home #Opportunity #Civilization

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

#Nursing #Sick #Requirements

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

#Selfish #Sacrifice #Nursing

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

#Religious #Men #Thinking

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

#Sexy #Passion #Nursing

A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties', forbid it. Her 'domestic duties', high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are but bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through), forbid it.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Light #Habit #Break

Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have preceded relapse, attack or death, and not assert that there were none, or that there were not the right ones. A want of the habit of observing conditions and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Average #People #Trying

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

#Selfish #War #Blood

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

#Happiness #Inspirational Life #Progress

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

#Nursing #Sick #Skins

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

#Mind #Wish #Body

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

#Horse #Men #Doctors

... people have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.
-- Florence Nightingale

#People #Few Words #Schemes

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

#Nurse

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

#Sick #Abuse #Care

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

#Nursing #Joy #Leader

I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Helping #My Family #No Sympathy

We know nothing of the principle of health, the positive of which pathology is the negative, except from observation and experience. And nothing but observation and experience will teach us the ways to maintain or to bring back the state of health. It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; ... nature alone cures. ... And what [true] nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Nursing #Medicine #Principles

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

#Nurse #Useless #May

The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Mind #Doctrine #Disease

The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Lying #Water #Firsts

There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions
-- Florence Nightingale

#Disease

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

#Nurse #Worthy #Deserve

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

#Vanity #Selfishness #Overcoming

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

#Doe #World #Moral

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary nevertheless to lay down such a principle ...
-- Florence Nightingale

#Sick #Principles #May

Nature alone cures. ... what nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Nursing #Nurse #Patient

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

#Adjectives #Nouns #Disease

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

#Heaven #Kingdoms #Circumstances

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

#Death #Morning #Men

Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Science #Average #Data

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

#Fancy #Conversation #Companion

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

#Nursing #Nurse #Patient

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.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Art #Nursing #Preparation

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

#Passion #Atmosphere #Would Be

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

#Children #Flower #Fall

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

#World #May #Birth

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

#Expression #Law #Ideas

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

#School #Soul #Physicians

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

#Buddhism #Growth #East

I use the word nursing for want of a better.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Nursing #Use #Want

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

#Organization #World #Permit

Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering... not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Spiritual #Men #Voice

I can stand out the war with any man.
-- Florence Nightingale

#War #Men #Standing Out

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

#Nursing #Air #Medicine

For the sick it is important to have the best.
-- Florence Nightingale

#Sick #Important #Importance

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

#Health #Nursing #Reality

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

#Health #Recovery #Mean