Florence Nightingale

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar…

— Florence Nightingale

Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less…

— Florence Nightingale

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink…

— Florence Nightingale

I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief... All my admirers are married; most of my friends are…

— Florence Nightingale

Unless we are making progress in our nursing every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going…

— Florence Nightingale

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

— Florence Nightingale

We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society…

— Florence Nightingale

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick…

— Florence Nightingale

If I could give you information of my life, it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has…

— Florence Nightingale

Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either…

— Florence Nightingale

The account he gives of nurses beats everything that even I know of. This young prophet says that they are all drunkards,…

— Florence Nightingale

We know nothing of the principle of health, the positive of which pathology is the negative, except from observation and experience. And…

— Florence Nightingale

My family tried to educate me in the way they thought a young woman should be. But I wanted to learn about…

— Florence Nightingale

Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have…

— Florence Nightingale

A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties', forbid it.…

— Florence Nightingale

We know nothing of the principle of health, the positive of which pathology is the negative, except from observation and experience. Nothing…

— Florence Nightingale

Nature alone cures. ... what nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to…

— 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…

— Florence Nightingale

Let whoever is in charge keep this simple question in her head (not, how can I always do this right thing myself,…

— Florence Nightingale

“You ask me why I do not write something… I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be…

— Florence Nightingale

Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a…

— Florence Nightingale

The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a…

— Florence Nightingale

I was very limited as a women. Getting the men in the military to see that the medical facilities were unhealthy was…

— Florence Nightingale

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs…

— Florence Nightingale

“What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and…

— Florence Nightingale

A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf,…

— Florence Nightingale

Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough,…

— Florence Nightingale

For it may safely be said, not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses,…

— Florence Nightingale

Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this,…

— Florence Nightingale

The amount of relief and comfort experienced by the sick after the skin has been carefully washed and dried, is one of…

— Florence Nightingale

If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food,…

— Florence Nightingale

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence…

— Florence Nightingale

May we hope that, when we are all dead and gone, leaders will arise who have been personally experienced in the hard,…

— Florence Nightingale

The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants…

— Florence Nightingale

All disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering:…

— Florence Nightingale

Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things…

— Florence Nightingale

Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of…

— Florence Nightingale

Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any…

— Florence Nightingale

When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their 'tea,' you cannot but feel that nature knows…

— Florence Nightingale

It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is…

— Florence Nightingale