Quotes from Florence Nightingale

Volumes are now being written and spoken about the effect of the mind on the body -- I wish more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.

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.

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.

Ignite the mind's spark to rise the sun in you

To attempt to keep a ward warm at the expense of making the sick repeatedly breathe their own hot, humid, putrescing atmosphere is a certain way to delay recovery or to destroy life.

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.

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.

I use the word nursing for want of a better.

One's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into action ... which bring results.

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.

There is no such thing as amateur art... You never yet made an artist by paying him well.

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.

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.

I 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.

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.

Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.

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.

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.

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 time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.

Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape from this death and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

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.

That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.