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 would not do for a policeman.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALEThe world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.
More Florence Nightingale Quotes
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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.
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A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.
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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.
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When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind – with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?
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Woman has nothing but her affections,–and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.
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People have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.
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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.
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Do not engage in any paper wars. You will convince nobody and arrive at no satisfaction yourself.
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I can stand out the war with any man.
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I am not yet worthy; and I will live to deserve to be called a Trained Nurse.
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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.
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For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make.
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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.
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Religious men are and must be heretics now- for we must not pray, except in a “form” of words, made beforehand- or think of God but with a prearranged idea.
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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.
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Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization.
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There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.
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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.
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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.
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A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.
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The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.
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Never underestimate the healing effects of beauty.
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For what is Mysticism? It is not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within’? Heaven is neither a place nor a time.
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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.
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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.
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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