Florence Nightingale Quotes
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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.
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God spoke to me and called me to His Service. What form this service was to take the voice did not say.
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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.
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I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse.
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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.
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To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.
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Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.
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It seems as if the female spirit of the world were mourning everlastingly over blessings, not lost, but which she has never had, and which, in her discouragement she feels that she never will have, they are so far off.
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Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.
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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. And, did we even see this, how can we make the difference? How obtain the interest which society declares she does not want, and we cannot want?
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God has taken away the greatest man of his generation, for Dr. Livingstone stood alone.
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The Church is now more like the Scribes and Pharisees than like Christ... What are now called the 'essential doctrines' of the Christian religion he does not even mention.
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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.
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I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet - all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.
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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.
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Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.
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The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for - its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.
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Religious men are and must be heretics now - for we must not pray, except in a 'form' of words, made beforehand - or think of God but with a prearranged idea.
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She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.
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Passion, intellect, moral activity - these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilisation.
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People do not go into the company of their fellow-creatures for what would seem a very sufficient reason, namely, that they have something to say to them, or something that they want to hear from them; but in the vague hope that they may find something to say.
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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.
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Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population.
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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 flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.