Florence Nightingale Quotes

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Florence Nightingale

Profession : Activist

Birth : May 12, 1820

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.

Florence Nightingale

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

Florence Nightingale

Every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day. If her face, too, so much the better.

Florence Nightingale

Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.

Florence Nightingale

Sick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish. They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.

Florence Nightingale

Everything you do in a patient's room, after he is 'put up' for the night, increases tenfold the risk of his having a bad night. But, if you rouse him up after he has fallen asleep, you do not risk - you secure him a bad night.

Florence Nightingale

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

Florence Nightingale

Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.

Florence Nightingale

Never speak to an invalid from behind, nor from the door, nor from any distance from him, nor when he is doing anything. The official politeness of servants in these things is so grateful to invalids, that many prefer, without knowing why, having none but servants about them.

Florence Nightingale

Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have no time in the day to themselves.

Florence Nightingale