Florence Nightingale Quotes - Page 5

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.

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.

I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.

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

There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions

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

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.

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.

Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited-though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air-of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.

Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery.

do not engage in any paper wars. You will convince nobody and arrive at no satisfaction yourself.

[On Thomas Babington Macaulay:] He was a most disagreeable companion to my fancy ... His conversation was a procession of one.

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

I was very limited as a women. Getting the men in the military to see that the medical facilities were unhealthy was very difficult, along with many other things such as getting a good education and also finding a good career.

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

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.

I can stand out the war with any man.

My family tried to educate me in the way they thought a young woman should be. But I wanted to learn about mathmatics. I must have gotten that from my father, he was a master of math and science, and I always liked that sort of thing, too. Of course my mother and father did not agree with me on becoming more educated in mathmatics, but I was persistent and eventualy they gave in and I was taught by a wonderful teacher.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Women dream till 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.

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.