Florence Nightingale Quotes

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Never speak to an invalid from behind, nor from the door, nor from any distance from him, nor when he is doing anything. The official politeness of servants in these things is so grateful to invalids, that many prefer, without knowing why, having none but servants about them.

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.

Everything you do in a patient’s room, after he is ‘put up’ for the night, increases tenfold the risk of his having a bad night. But, if you rouse him up after he has fallen asleep, you do not risk – you secure him a bad night.

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

Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.

A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth and promotes scrofula, rickets, etc., among the children. People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill, they cannot get well again in it.

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

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore.

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.

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