Quotations By Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910): A pioneer in the nursing field, she established herself as a competent nursing administrator during the Crimean War, where her insistence on sanitary conditions cut the death rate considerably. She continued to advance the field in her later years, providing better health service and opportunities for women at the same time.

Florence Nightingale has remained a symbol of the nursing profession and humanitarian work.

Women never have a half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. 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.


And so is the world put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts (which were meant, not for selfish gratification, but for the improvement of that world) to conventionality.


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


I can stand out the war with any man.


I stand at the altar of the murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.


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.


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.


For what is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within'? Heaven is neither a place nor a time.


You ask me why I do not write something.... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.