Florence Nightingale

When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their 'tea,' you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about. ... A little tea or coffee restores them. ... There is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea.

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.

I am not yet worthy; and I will live to deserve to be called a Trained Nurse.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

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.

A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.

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.

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

People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. 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. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients, are actual means of recovery.

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

To understand God's thoughts, one must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.

Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have preceded relapse, attack or death, and not assert that there were none, or that there were not the right ones. A want of the habit of observing conditions and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.

Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.

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.

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

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.

A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties', forbid it. Her 'domestic duties', high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are but bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through), forbid it.