Top 90 Florence Nightingale Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

52. “The ‘kingdom of heaven is within,’ indeed, but we must also create one without, because we are intended to act upon our circumstances.”

— Florence Nightingale

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

— Florence Nightingale

54. “The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.”

— Florence Nightingale

55. “The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the aid of Statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service.”

— Florence Nightingale

56. “Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.”

— Florence Nightingale

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

— Florence Nightingale

58. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

59. “Starting a job and working hard is how to be successful.”

— Florence Nightingale

60. “Bismarck was a large persian cat owned by Florence Nightingale.”

— Florence Nightingale

61. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

62. “The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea, have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea.”

— Florence Nightingale

63. “Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization.”

— Florence Nightingale

64. “A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.”

— Florence Nightingale

65. “What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they know a great deal.”

— Florence Nightingale

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

— Florence Nightingale

67. “We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master.”

— Florence Nightingale

68. “The most important pratical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe-how to observe-what symptoms indicate improvement-what the reverse-which are of importance-which are of none-which are the evidence of neglect-and of what kind of neglect.”

— Florence Nightingale

69. “I stand at the altar of murdered men, and, while I live, I fight their cause.”

— Florence Nightingale

70. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

71. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

72. “Woman has nothing but her affections, – and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.”

— Florence Nightingale

73. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

74. “The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.”

— Florence Nightingale

75. “I can stand out the war with any man.”

— Florence Nightingale

76. “People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying His prayer, and so on; but if anyone attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.”

— Florence Nightingale

77. “Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.”

— Florence Nightingale

78. “Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.”

— Florence Nightingale

79. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

80. “No woman has excited “passions” among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me.”

— Florence Nightingale

81. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

82. “It is very well to say “be prudent, be careful, try to know each other.” But how are you to know each other?”

— Florence Nightingale

83. “The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organization do not permit them to act.”

— Florence Nightingale

84. “Heaven is neither a place nor a time.”

— Florence Nightingale

85. “At present we live to impede each other’s satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?”

— Florence Nightingale

86. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

87. “Christ, if he had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer.”

— Florence Nightingale

88. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

89. “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.”

— Florence Nightingale

90. “Can the “word” be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.”

— Florence Nightingale

91. “I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.”

— Florence Nightingale

92. “Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid, – in other words, every woman is a nurse.”

— Florence Nightingale

93. “Women dream until they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone and they cannot recall them. And they are left without the food either of reality or of hope.”

— Florence Nightingale