There is no part of my life, upon which I can look back without pain. — Florence Nightingale

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift–there is nothing small about it. — Florence Nightingale

At present we live to impede each other’s satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? — Florence Nightingale

Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses….we must be learning all of our lives. — Florence Nightingale

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

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. — Florence Nightingale

Heaven is neither a place nor a time. — Florence Nightingale

How very little can be done under the spirit of fear. — Florence Nightingale

I use the word nursing for want of a better. — Florence Nightingale

Nursing is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts. — Florence Nightingale

Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing. — Florence Nightingale

Nursing is a progressive art such that to stand still is to go backwards. — Florence Nightingale

Nature alone cures. … what nursing has to do … is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him. — Florence Nightingale

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. — Florence Nightingale

For the sick it is important to have the best. — Florence Nightingale

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

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. — Florence Nightingale

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well. — Florence Nightingale

The craving for ‘the return of the day’, which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light. — Florence Nightingale

In a sick–room or a bed–room there should never be shutters shut. — Florence Nightingale

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary nevertheless to lay down such a principle. — Florence Nightingale

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. — Florence Nightingale

If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed–sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease, but of the nursing. — Florence Nightingale

Bismarck was a large persian cat owned by Florence Nightingale. — Florence Nightingale

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. — Florence Nightingale

No woman has excited ‘passions’ among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me. — Florence Nightingale

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. — Florence Nightingale

Woman has nothing but her affections,––and this makes her at once more loving and less loved. — Florence Nightingale

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have. — Florence Nightingale

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

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. — Florence Nightingale

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

Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity these, three and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised? — Florence Nightingale

The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ. — Florence Nightingale

Never underestimate the healing effects of beauty. — Florence Nightingale

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

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

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

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle How very little can be done under the spirit of fear. — Florence Nightingale

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. — Florence Nightingale

A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading. — Florence Nightingale

You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism. — Florence Nightingale