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.

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

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

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

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

Christ, if he had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer

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.

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.

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

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