The night is given to us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power.
That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.
The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organization do not permit them to act.
Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.
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.
Bismarck was a large persian cat owned by Florence Nightingale.
Never underestimate the healing effects of beauty.
All disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed.
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.
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.
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.
For the sick it is important to have the best.
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.
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.
I can stand out the war with any man.
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.
The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.
A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.
I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.
Patriotism is not enough, there must be no hatred or bitterness for anyone.