Florence Nightingale
No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me.Collection: Passion
Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.Collection: Nursing
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.Collection: Family
Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.Collection: Doe
When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their 'tea,' you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about. ... A little tea or coffee restores them. ... There is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea.Collection: Coffee
At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?Collection: Competition
Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity these, three and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Nursing
A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.Collection: Average
Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilizationCollection: Nursing
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.Collection: Health
... people have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.Collection: People
I cannot remember the time when I have not longed for death. ... for years and years I used to watch for death as no sick man ever watched for the morning.Collection: Death
The account he gives of nurses beats everything that even I know of. This young prophet says that they are all drunkards, without exception, Sisters and all, and that there are but two whom the surgeon can trust to give the patients their medicines.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Children
Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have preceded relapse, attack or death, and not assert that there were none, or that there were not the right ones. A want of the habit of observing conditions and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.Collection: Death
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.' 1852Collection: Hurt
What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.Collection: Selfish
Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering... not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man.Collection: Spiritual
Bismarck was a large persian cat owned by Florence Nightingale.Collection: Cat
Heaven is neither a place nor a time.Collection: Angel
It is very well to say "be prudent, be careful, try to know each other." But how are you to know each other?Collection: Trying
I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.Collection: Helping
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.Collection: Party
There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditionsCollection: Disease
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.Collection: Nursing
Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited-though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air-of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.Collection: Health
Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery.Collection: Healing
do not engage in any paper wars. You will convince nobody and arrive at no satisfaction yourself.Collection: War
[On Thomas Babington Macaulay:] He was a most disagreeable companion to my fancy ... His conversation was a procession of one.Collection: Fancy
The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organization do not permit them to act.Collection: Organization
I was very limited as a women. Getting the men in the military to see that the medical facilities were unhealthy was very difficult, along with many other things such as getting a good education and also finding a good career.Collection: Military
You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.Collection: Buddhism
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.Collection: Nursing
I can stand out the war with any man.Collection: War
My family tried to educate me in the way they thought a young woman should be. But I wanted to learn about mathmatics. I must have gotten that from my father, he was a master of math and science, and I always liked that sort of thing, too. Of course my mother and father did not agree with me on becoming more educated in mathmatics, but I was persistent and eventualy they gave in and I was taught by a wonderful teacher.Collection: Mother
In a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut.Collection: Inspirational
The craving for 'the return of the day', which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.Collection: Nursing
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.Collection: Chance
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.Collection: Religious
Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Nurse
Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again - the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.Collection: World
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.Collection: Nursing
Statistics is the most important science in the whole world: for upon it depends the practical application of every other science and of every art: the one science essential to all political and social administration, all education, all organization based on experience, for it only gives results of our experience.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Health