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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.

Florence Nightingale

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Florence Nightingale
Age: 90 †
Born: 1820
Born: May 12
Died: 1910
Died: August 13
Nurse
Politician
Statistician
Teacher
Writer
Florence
Tuscany
Nightingale Florence
Lady with the Lamp
Angel of Crimea
Miss Smith
States
Civilisation
Impossibility
Arrived
Intellect
Physical
Wants
Moral
State
Supplying

More quotes by Florence Nightingale

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The account he gives of nurses beats everything that even I know of. This young prophet says that they are all drunkards, without exception, Sisters and all, and that there are but two whom the surgeon can trust to give the patients their medicines.
Florence Nightingale
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Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.
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... people have founded vast schemes upon a very few words.
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diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.
Florence Nightingale
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People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying His prayer, and so on but if anyone attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.
Florence Nightingale
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Heaven is neither a place nor a time.
Florence Nightingale
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Life is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling with the principle of evil, hand to hand, foot to foot. Every inch of the way is disputed. The night is given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power. The day, to use the strength which has been given us, to go forth to work with it till the evening.
Florence Nightingale
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The night is given to us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power.
Florence Nightingale
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do not engage in any paper wars. You will convince nobody and arrive at no satisfaction yourself.
Florence Nightingale
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Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.
Florence Nightingale
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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.
Florence Nightingale
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Nature alone cures. ... what nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.
Florence Nightingale
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Passion, intellect, moral activity - these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilisation.
Florence Nightingale
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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.
Florence Nightingale
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Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses....we must be learning all of our lives.
Florence Nightingale
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You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.
Florence Nightingale
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Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
Florence Nightingale
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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.
Florence Nightingale
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It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary nevertheless to lay down such a principle.
Florence Nightingale
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What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.
Florence Nightingale