Florence Nightingale Quotes

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

I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.

For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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