Looking for famous nursing quotes by Florence Nightingale? We have rounded up the best collection of most inspirational Florence Nightingale Quotes, sayings, (with images and pictures) about nursing, art, education, leadership and more.
Also See: Proud To Be a Nurse Quotes
Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was an English social reformer, statistician and revolutionary figure in the field of nursing. She was known as ‘The Angel of Crimea’ or the ‘Lady with the Lamp’.
The nursing profession today is, in large part of our medical fraternity, because of Nightingale’s dedication and commitment to serve others taking a holistic approach. She also wrote the book Notes On Nursing.
Selfless and God-fearing, Ms. Nightingale had give up her life of luxury to care for the sick and dying during the Crimean War. Don’t miss our article on inspirational doctor quotes, who serve us at large during tough times.
Top 10 Florence Nightingale Quotes
- “For the sick it is important to have the best.”― Florence Nightingale
Nursing Quotes Florence Nightingale
- “Ignite the mind’s spark to rise the sun in you.”― Florence Nightingale
- “Never underestimate the healing effects of beauty.”― Florence Nightingale
- “Remember my name – you’ll be screaming it later.”― Florence Nightingale
- “How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.”― Florence Nightingale
- “Let each person tell the truth from his own experience.”― Florence Nightingale
- “Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.”― ― Florence Nightingale
- “The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.”― Florence Nightingale
- “I attribute my success to this:—I never gave or took an excuse.”― Florence Nightingale
- “I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.”― Florence Nightingale
- “There is no part of my life, upon which I can look back without pain.”― Florence Nightingale
- “Nursing is a progressive art such that to stand still is to go backwards.”
Florence Nightingale Quotes 150 years
- “Diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.”― Florence Nightingale
- “The best nurses have the essential qualifications before they go to school.”― Florence Nightingale
- “Patriotism is not enough, there must be no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”― Florence Nightingale
Famous Quotes By Florence Nightingale
- “I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.”
- “Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift – there is nothing small about it.”
- “Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.”
- “Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses….we must be learning all of our lives.”
- “Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.”
- “That “of His own good pleasure” He has ” predestined” any souls to eternal damnation.”
- “I did not think of going to give myself a position, but for the sake of common humanity.”
- “Never dispute with anybody who wishes to contradict you, says a most reasonable saint.”
- “To be a good nurse one must be a good woman, or one is truly nothing but a tinling bell.”
- “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture next to it.”
- “Woman has nothing but her affections,–and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.”
Quotes From Florence Nightingale
- “Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on the sick or the well.”
- “To be a fellow worker with God is the highest aspiration of which we can conceive man capable.”
- “A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place.”
- “To understand God’s thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.”
- “Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.”
- “God spoke to me and called me to His Service. What form this service was to take the voice did not say.”
- “Mankind must make heaven before we can ‘go to heaven’ (as the phrase is), in this world as in any other.”
- “And what nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.”
- “Every nurse out to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day. If her face, too, so much the better.”
- “I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act and they make excuses.”
Florence Nightingale quotes statistics
- “It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.”
- “The craving for ‘the return of the day’, which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.”
- “To be ‘in charge’ is certainly not only to carry out the proper measures yourself but to see that everyone else does so too.”
- “The world is put back by the death of everyone who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.”
- “I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.”
- “There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “I wish all the disinfecting fluids invented made such an “abominable smell” that they forced you to admit fresh air. That would be a useful invention.”
- “Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.”
- “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.”
- “What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they know nothing and think they know a great deal.”
- “Let us run the race where all may win, rejoicing in their successes – as our own – and mourning their failures, wherever they are – as our own. We are all one Nurse.”
- “Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flowers, when it is by itself. to praise God for it.”
- “Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with god – to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness.”
- “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.”
- “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?”
- “Beggars in the streets of London were at that time leading the lives of princes, compared to the life of our soldiers in the Crimea when I arrived on the scene with thirty-six nurses.”
- “In it and in the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a petition. There is never a word of the theory that God’s dealings with us are to show His “power”; still less of the theory.”
- “Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.”
- “Women dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “May we hope that, when we are all dead and gone, leaders will arise who have been personally experienced in the hard, practical work, the difficulties, and the joys of organizing nursing reforms, and who will lead far beyond anything we have done!”
- “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.”
- “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.”
See More Inspirational Quotes
The World Health Assembly has designated 2020 the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife to honor of the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth and to advance nurses’ vital role in transforming health care around the world. Hope the greatest, and most inspiring Florence Nightingale quotes make your everyday shift something to remember.
Through her words and actions, she continues to inspire generations of nurses and healthcare professionals.
