Best Florence Nightingale Quotes
Florence Nightingale Quotes About Nursing, Compassion, Leadership, 150 Years, Learning, Environment, Education & God! Florentine Nightingale is regarded as the creator of modern nursing and a social reformer. She was instrumental in promoting medical training and improving sanitation. In Florence, Italy, she was born on May 12, 1820. Her education included the study of ancient Greek and Latin and current French, German, and Italian languages. After overcoming her parents’ misgivings, she studied history, grammar, and philosophy and received math instruction at the age of 20.
As a child, Florence Nightingale showed a strong interest in helping the sick and impoverished in her hometown. Her parents had intended her to have a more conventional life, but Nightingale had opted for a different route. Despite their protests, she opted to pursue a career in nursing, which was an unresected field for women. During the Crimean War, British and French armies attacked the Russian Empire to control Ottoman territory in October 1853.
When she went to war in 1854, she was escorted to the front by 38 other women, including Catholic and Anglican sisters alike. On November 5, 1854, she arrived in the Turkish military hospital at Scutari. Infectious illnesses such as typhoid and cholera killed more troops than combat injuries.
Her nickname became “The Lady with The Lamp” because she insisted on being the only woman allowed to visit patients’ rooms at night, and she carried a lamp with her. Deaths plummeted from 60% to 2% six months after her entrance to the hospital. In 1857, she wrote a lengthy account of her Crimean War experiences. On August 13, 1910, she passed away. Many women were inspired to become nurses as a result of her reputation.
Best Florence Nightingale Quotes
1. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
2. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
3. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
4. “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?” – Florence Nightingale
5. “What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they know a great deal.” – Florence Nightingale
6. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
7. “The craving for ‘the return of the day’, which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.” – Florence Nightingale
8. “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 sickbed.” – Florence Nightingale
9. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
10. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
11. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
12. “That “of His own good pleasure” He has ” predestined” any souls to eternal damnation.”” – Florence Nightingale
13. “It is very well to say “be prudent, be careful, try to know each other.” But how are you to know each other?” – Florence Nightingale
14. “That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.” – Florence Nightingale
15. “There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilization at which we have arrived.” – Florence Nightingale
16. “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 there.” – Florence Nightingale
17. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
18. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
19. “For the sick it is important to have the best.” – Florence Nightingale
20. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
21. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
22. “The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.” – Florence Nightingale
23. “To be a fellow worker with God is the highest aspiration of which we can conceive man capable.” – Florence Nightingale
24. “Mankind must make heaven before we can “go to heaven” (as the phrase is), in this world as in any other.” – Florence Nightingale
25. “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.” – Florence Nightingale
26. “Never dispute with anybody who wishes to contradict you, says a most reasonable saint.” – Florence Nightingale
27. “I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.” – Florence Nightingale
28. “I did not think of going to give myself a position, but for the sake of common humanity.” – Florence Nightingale
29. “If you knew how unreasonably sick people suffer from reasonable causes of distress, you would take more pains about all these things.” – Florence Nightingale
30. “I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.”― Florence Nightingale
