Florence Nightingale was a rock star. That’s just a fact. If it weren’t for her, modern nursing could be much different. A brilliant statistician, a proponent of modern healthcare, and a hero, Florence Nightingale definitely earned our respect! Here are some best quotes by Florence Nightingale.
We can’t forget about the Nightingale pledge that nurses have been reciting for over a century. More information can be found in the link above. Enjoy!
Best Quotes
“You do not want the effect of your good things to be, “How wonderful for a woman!” nor would you be deterred from good things, by hearing it said, “Yes, but she ought not to have done this, because it is not suitable for a woman.” But you want to do the thing that is good, whether it is “suitable for a woman” or not.
It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.
Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”
― Florence Nightingale
“Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.”
― Florence Nightingale
Best Quotes by Florence Nightingale
“If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything.”
― Florence Nightingale
“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.’ 1852”
― Florence Nightingale
“If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient, “because it is not her business,” I should say that nursing was not her calling. I have seen surgical “sisters,” women whose hands were worth to them two or three guineas a-week, down upon their knees scouring a room or hut, because they thought it otherwise not fit for their patients to go into. I am far from wishing nurses to scour. It is a waste of power. But I do say that these women had the true nurse-calling—the good of their sick first, and second only the consideration what it was their “place” to do—and that women who wait for the housemaid to do this, or for the charwoman to do that, when their patients are suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them.”
― Florence Nightingale
Best Quotes by Florence Nightingale
“I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons); of the jargon, namely, about the “rights” of women, which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do; and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be “recalled to a sense of their duty as women,” and because “this is women’s work,” and “that is men’s,” and “these are things which women should not do,” which is all assertion and nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries.”
― Florence Nightingale
“Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on the sick or the well.”
― Florence Nightingale
“I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.”
― Florence Nightingale
“The martyr sacrifices herself entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.”
― Florence Nightingale
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