Florence Nightingale Quotes (1820-1910)

“You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.”

“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.”

“A small pet animal is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially. A pet bird in a cage is sometimes the only pleasure of an invalid confined for years to the same room.”

“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.”

“A woman dedicates herself to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it. But if she has any destiny, any vocation of her own, she must renounce it, in nine cases out of ten.”

“I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.”

“I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.”

“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.”

“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; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body..., the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.”

“Law is the continuous manifestation of God's presence — not reason for believing him absent. Great confusion arises from our using the same word law in two totally distinct senses … as the cause and the effect. It is said that to "explain away" everything by law is to enable us to do without God. But law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. Law brings us continually back to God instead of carrying us away from him.”

“They had in Miss Nightingale a woman of genius, who had made her subject her particular study... Moreover, he had no hesitation in saying that Miss Nightingale in her present position had exhibited greater power of organisation, a greater familiarity with details, while at the same time she took a comprehensive view of the general bearing of the subject, than had marked the conduct of any one connected with the hospitals during the present war. (Cheers.) An anecdote which had lately been sent to him by a correspondent, showed her great power over all with whom she came into contact. Here was the passage:—"I have just heard such a pretty account from a soldier describing the comfort it was to see even Florence pass—‘She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to a many more; but she couldn't do it to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again content.’" And his correspondent then very justly remarked,—"What poetry there is in these men!" And again:—"I think I told you of another, who said, ‘Before she came there was such cussin and swearin, but after that it was as holy as a church.’" He had been told, too, by eye-witnesses that it was most singular to remark how, when men, frenzied, perhaps, by their wounds and disease, had worked themselves into a passionate refusal to submit to necessary operations, a few calm sentences of hers seemed at once to allay the storm, and the men would submit willingly to the painful ordeal they had to undergo. They could not pretend to offer to such a woman any recompense for her services without lowering their high standard. The only suitable mark of gratitude which could be shown her would be one which would testify the confidence of the English people in her energy, ability, and zeal.”

“In an undertaking so wholly new to our English customs, so at variance with the usual education given to women in this country, we shall meet with perplexities, difficulties, even failures... It will be the true, the lasting glory of Florence Nightingale and her band of devoted assistants, that they have broken through what Goethe calls a "Chinese wall of prejudices;" prejudices religious, social, professional; and established a precedent which will indeed "multiply the good to all time."”

“If the generous women thus sacrificing themselves were all alike in devotion to their sacred cause, there was one of them —the Lady-in-Chief—who not only came armed with the special experience needed, but also was clearly transcendent in that subtle quality which gives to one human being a power of command over others. Of slender, delicate form, engaging, highly-bred, and in council a rapt careful listener, so long as others were speaking, and strongly, though gently, persuasive whenever speaking herself, the Lady-in-Chief—the Lady Florence, Miss Nightingale—gave her heart to his enterprise in a spirit of absolute devotion.”

“Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom. And flit from room to room.”

“History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun. How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history? There is a thirst out there both for knowledge and to be entertained, and the market has responded with enthusiasm.”

“In literature, books which disclosed life and its miseries, and character with its sufferings, burnt themselves in upon her mind, and created much of her future effort. She was never resorted to for sentiment. Sentimentalists never had a chance with her. Besides that her character was too strong, and its quality too real for any sympathy with shallowness and egotism, she had two characteristics which might well daunt the sentimentalists—her reserve, and her capacity for ridicule. Ill would they have fared who had come to her for responsive sympathies about sentiment, or even real woes in which no practical help was proposed; and there is perhaps nothing uttered by her, from her evidence before the Sanitary Commission for the Army to her recently published Notes on Nursing, which does not disclose powers of irony which self-regardant persons may well dread.”

“Her chief contribution to the inheritance of the race has been that, besides demonstrating in action the full perfection of the allied arts of nursing and sanitation, she has left in her writings a philosophy, as it were, of nursing, together with an intellectual demonstration of the scientific and natural basis of hygiene and its practical application, and has laid down once and for all their essential underlying principles with a clarity, a logic, an originality, and a depth of reflection that mark the genius and place her works among the classics.”

“Miss Nightingale in appearance, is just what you would expect in any other well-bred woman, who may have seen perhaps rather more than thirty years of life; her manner and countenance are prepossessing, and this without the possession of positive beauty; it is a face not easily forgotten, pleasing in its smile, with an eye betokening great self possession, and giving when she wishes, a quiet look of firm determination to every feature. Her general demeanour is quiet and rather reserved; still I am much mistaken if she is not gifted with a very lively sense of the ridiculous. In conversation, she speaks on matters of business with a grave earnestness, one would not expect from her appearance. She has evidently a mind disciplined to restrain under the principles of the action of the moment, every feeling which would interfere with it. She has trained herself to command, and learned the value of conciliation towards others, and constraint over herself. I can conceive her to be a strict disciplinarian; she throws herself into a work—as it's Head—as such she knows well how much success must depend upon literal obedience to her every order. She seems to understand business thoroughly, though to me she had the failure common to many "Heads," a too great love of management in the small details which had better perhaps have been left to others. Her nerve is wonderful; I have been with her at very severe operations; she was more than equal to the trial. She has an utter disregard of contagion; I have known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The more awful to every sense any particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, her slight form would be seen bending over him, administering to his ease in every way in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him.”

“Miss Nightingale raised the art of nursing in this country from a menial employment to an honoured vocation; she taught nurses to be ladies, and she brought ladies out of the bondage of idleness to be nurses. This, which was the aim of her life, was no fruit of her Crimean experience, although that experience enabled her to give effect to her purpose more readily than were otherwise possible. Long before she went to the Crimea she felt deeply the "disgraceful antithesis" between Mrs. Gamp and a sister of mercy. The picture of her at Scutari is of a strong-willed, strong-nerved energetic woman, gentle and pitiful to the wounded, but always masterful among those with whom she worked. After the war she worked with no less zeal or resolution, and realised many of her early dreams. She was not only the reformer of nursing but a leader of women.”

“If our social arrangements were so adjusted that each person could follow that calling in life which they are by nature adapted for, what a great gainer society as a whole would be. These few who are so fortunate as to be able to follow the calling of their heart’s desire make a success of life. Florence Nightingale was one of the fortunate few, who could engage in that occupation for which she was best adapted. Florence Nightingale was a born nurse. In her was found that rare combination of heart, brain and sympathy which makes the ideal nurse. It is when one is laid low by the ravages of disease that they can appreciate to its utmost depth the value of human kindness...In the future, when the war drum will be heard no more, and the only reveille to be sounded will be that which shall call men to the peaceful walks of life, the name of Florence Nightingale will be revered, as a woman who, though delicate and far removed from want, nevertheless was willing to risk her own life, that she might bring relief to that most stupid victim of our present system, the soldier.”

“The woman activist or artist born of a family-centered mother may in any case feel that her mother cannot understand or sympathize with the imperatives of her life; or that her mother has preferred and valued a more conventional daughter, or a son. In order to study nursing, Florence Nightingale was forced to battle, in the person of her mother, the restrictive conventions of upper-class Victorian womanhood, the destiny of a life in drawing rooms and country houses in which she saw women going mad "for want of something to do."”

“I had been in the "home" less than a week when an invitation came from Miss Nightingale for me to visit her in her London home. Shall I ever forget the excitement that invitation caused? Miss Crossland told me Miss Nightingale would ask my opinion of the different nurses, both ladies and others, and I could see that there was a little anxiety felt concerning the answers I might give. I went on the appointed day and must say I did not feel quite at my ease as the maid took me to Miss Nightingale's room, but one look into those kind, clear-blue eyes, and the hearty grasp of the little hand quite set me at ease, and before I knew it I was talking as freely to her, who had done more than any one woman living to alleviate suffering, as I would have to a life-long friend.”

“Every element of army hygiene, diet, shelter, ventilation, latrines, clothing, rest periods, provision of orderlies, was to be codified. Miss Nightingale, drawing upon excellent advice from her Crimea cronies, provided the codes. Together the Notes constitute an astonishing example of her gift for imagining palpable needs and assembling workable remedies. She was creating a self-acting, self-regulating system, embodying individual will-power in action, designed to secure the maximum output of useful work for the total money and manpower expended.”

“She is rather high in stature, fair in complexion, and slim in person; her hair is brown, and is worn quite plain; her physiognomy is most pleasing; her eyes, of a bluish tint, speak volumes, and are always sparkling with intelligence; her mouth is small and well formed, while her lips act in unison, and make known the impression of her heart—one seems the reflex of the other. Her visage, as regards expression, is very remarkable, and one can almost anticipate by her countenance what she is about to say: alternately, with matters of the most grave import, a gentle smile passes radiantly over her countenance, thus proving her evenness of temper; at other times, when wit or a pleasantry prevails, the heroine is lost in the happy, good-natured smile which pervades her face, and you recognise only the charming woman. Her dress is generally of a greyish or black tint; she wears a simple white cap, and often a rough apron. In a word, her whole appearance is religiously simple and unsophisticated. In conversation no member of the fair sex can be more amiable and gentle than Miss Nightingale. Removed from her arduous and cavalier-like duties, which require the nerve of a Hercules,—and she possesses it when required,—she is Rachel on the stage in both tragedy and comedy.”

“We have made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance and are delighted and very much struck with her great gentleness, simplicity, and wonderful clear and comprehensive head. I wish we had her at the War Office. Her modesty and unselfishness are really hardly to be believed, and she is so ladylike.”

“Florence Nightingale lifted the vague, casual, though kindly and devoted, feeling of women into organized, efficient and invaluable service; she enlarged the nurse’s vision to sympathy for great groups outside her family or particular tribe.”

“Her position in Indian affairs was even more extraordinary than her position at the War Office. She had never been to India, she never did go to India, and yet she was considered an expert on India and consulted on its affairs by men who had lived there all their working lives. This knowledge was the reward of her enormous labours on the Station Reports. To her bedroom had come a return from almost every military station in India, not from one Presidency or one district but the entire Peninsula. Year after year she had toiled, examining, classifying, grouping. She possessed prodigious powers of absorbing, retaining, and marshaling masses of facts, and when she had completed her task the whole vast teeming country lay before her mind's eye like a map.”