Florence Nightingale Quotes

Every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day. If her face, too, so much the better.

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

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.

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

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

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

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.

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

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.

Never underestimate the healing effects of beauty.

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.

Starting a job and working hard is how to be successful.

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

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.

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.

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.

For the sick it is important to have the best.