Florence Nightingale Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

Never underestimate the healing effects of beauty.

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.

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

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

Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization

Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I use the word nursing for want of a better.

Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery.

Bismarck was a large persian cat owned by 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.

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.

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

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

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

... people have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.

I can stand out the war with any man.

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

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

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

Heaven is neither a place nor a time.

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.

I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.

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

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

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

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

One's feelings waste themselves in words they ought all to be distilled into action ... which bring results.

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

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

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.