Florence Nightingale

The causes of disease are not in the air, but in the filth.

No system of nursing can be good which does not make the nurse a thinking being.

The ultimate goal of nursing is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.

The first requirement of a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

The world is put back by the death of everyone who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

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.

Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care which can be inflicted either on sick or well.

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 will not do for a nurse.

A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place.

The craving for 'the return of the day', which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light.

Voluntary, cheerful obedience is the law of our being. Without it, we should come to grief.

The most important practical 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.

It is a much better safeguard to have the habit of always seeking the will of God, than to have sudden impulses of feeling.

Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended, at all events, to take in the whole sick population.

The nurse must be no gossip, no vain talker; she should never answer questions about her sick except to those who have a right to ask them.

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.

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.

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, and dysentery, chronic and acute, and 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.