Quotes
71 Classic Florence Nightingale Quotes to Heal The World
Florence Nightingale is a name we’re all familiar with, but why? Well, for a myraid of reasons! It’s through her essays that she was able to ignite a healthcare reform around the world. Any money she received was put back into nurse training and reform proposal to increase the conditions of both military and civilian hospitals around the world.
She certainly met adversity along the way. Not only did her rich parents not support her quest, but she saw first-hand the poor sanitation at British hospitals where most often, more soldiers died from infections rather than enemy attacks.
Remarkably, she lived until age 90 at a time when the average lifespan of females was much less. And while she passed away more than 110 years ago, her impact on the world continues to be felt. We sourced these quotes by Florence Nightingale from a variety of sources which is timely given the shock of COVID-19 and subsequent change in global sanitation.
She was known as “The Lady with the Lamp” and we hope you’re inspired by this lighthouse of knowledge as much as we are!
1. Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.
Florence Nightingale
2. I did not think of going to give myself a position, but for the sake of common humanity.
Florence Nightingale
3. Never dispute with anybody who wishes to contradict you, says a most reasonable saint.
Florence Nightingale
4. I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.
Florence Nightingale
5. I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.
Florence Nightingale
6. Mankind must make heaven before we can ‘go to heaven’ (as the phrase is), in this world as in any other.
Florence Nightingale
7. 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
8. 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
9. 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
10. 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
11. Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
Florence Nightingale
12. I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
13. To be a fellow worker with God is the highest aspiration of which we can conceive man capable.
Florence Nightingale
14. To understand God’s thoughts one must study statistics… the measure of his purpose.
Florence Nightingale
15. I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
16. 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.
Florence Nightingale
17. 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
18. 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
19. How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
Florence Nightingale
20. 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
21. I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.
Florence Nightingale
22. Every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day. If her face, too, so much the better.
Florence Nightingale
23. She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.
Florence Nightingale
24. 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
25. Women should have the true nurse calling, the good of the sick first the second only the consideration of what is their ‘place’ to do – and that women who want for a housemaid to do this or the charwomen to do that, when the patient is suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them.
Florence Nightingale
26. 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
27. By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it.
Florence Nightingale
28. Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on the sick or the well.
Florence Nightingale
29. 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
30. 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
31. If you knew how unreasonably sick people suffer from reasonable causes of distress, you would take more pains about all these things.
Florence Nightingale
32. Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.
Florence Nightingale
33. Far the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.
Florence Nightingale
34. 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
35. 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
36. The martyr sacrifices herself entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.
Florence Nightingale
37. Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.
Florence Nightingale
38. The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.
Florence Nightingale
39. 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
40. Woman has nothing but her affections,–and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.
Florence Nightingale
41. That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.
Florence Nightingale
42. 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
43. What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they know a great deal.
Florence Nightingale
44. 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
45. That “of His own good pleasure” He has ” predestined” any souls to eternal damnation.
Florence Nightingale
46. 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.
Florence Nightingale
47. To understand God’s thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.
Florence Nightingale
48. God spoke to me and called me to His Service. What form this service was to take the voice did not say.
Florence Nightingale
49. 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
50. The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.
Florence Nightingale
51. 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
52. 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
53. 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
54. 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
55. 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
56. There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.
Florence Nightingale
57. 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
58. Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion. Remember he is face to face with his enemy all the time.
Florence Nightingale
59. 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
60. 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
61. I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons); of the jargon, namely, about the “rights” of women, which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do; and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be “recalled to a sense of their duty as women,” and because “this is women’s work,” and “that is men’s,” and “these are things which women should not do,” which is all assertion and nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries.
Florence Nightingale
62. 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
63. 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
64. Remember my name – you’ll be screaming it later.
Florence Nightingale
65. The craving for ‘the return of the day’, which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.
Florence Nightingale
66. I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act and they make excuses.
Florence Nightingale
67. For the sick it is important to have the best.
Florence Nightingale
68. 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
69. 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
70. The most important pratical 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
71. There is no part of my life, upon which I can look back without pain.
Florence Nightingale
