Florence Nightingale Quotes

When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind - with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows
the laws of God and can apply them? ~ Florence Nightingale

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

I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. But be careful. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal you know. ~ Margaret Atwood

Women never have a half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. 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.' 1852 ~ Florence Nightingale

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

The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for- its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be. ~ 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. ~ Florence Nightingale

Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God - to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. ~ Florence Nightingale

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

Florence Nightingale was never called "the Lady with the Lamp," but "the Lady with the Hammer," an image deftly readjusted by the war reporter of the Times since it was far too coarse for the folks back home. Far from gliding about the hospital with her lamp aloft, Nightingale earned her nickname through a ferocious attack on a locked storeroom when a military commander refused to give her the medical supplies she needed. ~ Rosalind Miles

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

Can she sing? She's practically a Florence Nightingale. ~ Samuel Goldwyn

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

Everything you do in a patient's room, after he is 'put up' for the night, increases tenfold the risk of his having a bad night. But, if you rouse him up after he has fallen asleep, you do not risk - you secure him a bad night. ~ Florence Nightingale

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

Remember my name
you'll be screaming it later. ~ Florence Nightingale

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

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

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

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

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality. ~ Sam Kean

All disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed. ~ Florence Nightingale

To be "in charge" is certainly not only to carry out the proper measures yourself but to see that every one 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

Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited-though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air-of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays. ~ Florence Nightingale

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN MEMORIAM: FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
She whom we love, our Lady of Compassion,
Can never die, for Love forbids her death.
Love has bent down in his old kindly fashion,
And breathed upon her his immortal breath.
On wounded soldiers, in their anguish lying,
Her gentle spirit shall descend like rain.
Where the white flag with the red cross is flying,
There shall she dwell, the vanquisher of pain. ~ Joyce Kilmer

People think me a sort of Florence Nightingale, but I have no heroic qualities. I simply don't feel very much. ~ Franny Billingsley

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

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

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

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

For all her active goodness, Florence Nightingale herself was far from being the angelic figure of popular adulation: according to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians she was a self-righteous, domineering amazon, who was ruthless in her compassion, merciless in her philantropy, destructive in friendships, obsessional in her list for power, and demonic in her saintliness. ~ David Cannadine

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

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

You look extremely young," said Miss Nightingale....
"Age isn't really a matter of years, I find," returned Phemie. "I know people twice my age who will never be as old as I am now. ~ Frances Murray

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. ~ Florence Nightingale

Heaven is neither a place nor a time. ~ Florence Nightingale

You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling.
It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized. ~ Stella Gibbons

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

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 never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small. ~ Florence Nightingale

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

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

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

Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow. ~ Florence Nightingale

I've been diagnosed as being bi-polar but so have Florence Nightingale and King David ... which kinda leaves me in pretty dam good company ... if I must say so. ~ Timothy Pina

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

She suddenly realizes that Bob, the probable cancer patient, is standing in the hallway looking lost. She stops and tries to look concerned.
'Will you be okay?' As if I give a fuck.
'Yeah,' he replies forlornly. 'I'll be fine.'
She gives him a quick kiss on the forehead – as sexual as Florence Nightingale on a TB ward – and rushes from the house. ~ Tom Winter

I like people who don't accept boundaries. Like Florence Nightingale. And Napoleon or Louis XIV, though I'm not sure how much I'd have liked to meet them. I admire people who aren't circumscribed by circumstance. ~ Julian Fellowes

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

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

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

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

You told me this lawsuit isn't about race. But that's what started it. And it doesn't matter if you can convince the jury I'm the reincarnation of Florence Nightingale - you can't take away the fact that I am Black. The truth is, if I looked like you, this would not be happening to me. ~ Jodi Picoult

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

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

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

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature. ~ Stacy Schiff

When I was 12 years old, I read 'Nancy Drew' mysteries and biographies of Madame Curie and Florence Nightingale and books about girls who love horses or go to nursing school. I belonged to the Girl Scouts and got A's in school and rarely disobeyed my parents. I still kept a collection of Barbie dolls in my room, and I almost never spoke to boys. ~ Joyce Maynard

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

Florence Nightingale was an amazing figure. She created the American Red Cross. She saw the suffering from bad health conditions on the battlefield and in the military hospitals, and she fought like crazy to change the conditions; to make sure that the doctors washed their hands and practiced sanitary measures. She put herself at great risks. ~ Sharon Lawrence

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

In France it was Joan of Arc; in the Crimea it was Florence Nightingale; in the deep south there was Rosa Parks; in India there was Mother Teresa and in Florida there was Katherine Harris. ~ Larry Gatlin

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 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

I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief ... All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it. ~ Florence Nightingale

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her statistics were more than a study ... For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed - and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief - that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator - to say nothing of the politician - too often failed for want of this knowledge. ~ Karl Pearson

The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party. ~ Florence Nightingale

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

People have founded vast schemes upon a very few words. ~ Florence Nightingale

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

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

If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything. ~ Florence Nightingale

Fanny was upset when Crittenden criticized Florence Nightingale, the celebrated British nurse of the Crimean War, saying, he thought it a very unwomanly thing for a gentle lady to go into a hospital of wounded men. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

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

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

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