Top 214 Florence Nightingale Quotes & Sayings

Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.

My grandfather is from Ireland. His name is Florence McCarthy. He moved to New York in 1920. They used to beat him up because his name was Florence. He had to switch his name to Frank. And then this Christmas, he made an announcement - he goes, 'I'm switching me name back to Florence.' And we beat him up, 'cause it's a dumb name and he's old and weak and it was easy.

I like people who don't accept boundaries. Like Florence Nightingale. And Napoleon or Louis XIV, though I'm not sure how much I'd have liked to meet them. I admire people who aren't circumscribed by circumstance.

I got married in Florence, Italy. My husband and I were in love but totally broke, so we eloped and got married in Italy, where he was going on a business trip. We had to pull a guy off the street to be our witness. It was incredibly romantic. Florence is still one of my favorite cities in the world.

Florence Nightingale was an amazing figure. She created the American Red Cross. She saw the suffering from bad health conditions on the battlefield and in the military hospitals, and she fought like crazy to change the conditions; to make sure that the doctors washed their hands and practiced sanitary measures. She put herself at great risks.

People think me a sort of Florence Nightingale, but I have no heroic qualities. I simply don’t feel very much.

We would go on retreats to Florence. The people in the planning team got to be good friends and so we did things like, we'd all go over to the Fort Belvedere in Florence and take that thing over. Because it's up for grabs, you can rent it. And then have New Age meetings and all that kind of stuff. [Buckminster] Fuller loved to go there.

You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling. It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized.

I've always considered Florence as my girlfriend. I don't have to explain my love for this city.

I love Manchester, but I would like to have a getaway place in Florence.

The nightingale is sovereign of song.

The Nile has long nourished women and men alike. On the Nile and the magical, river-island Temple of Philae, Florence Nightingale was so inspired that she resolved to follow her calling in nursing.

Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.

Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad? Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people.

I guess I could've been a prima ballerina. Or a nurse. Aretha Nightingale!

You put a spell on the dog," I said as we left the house. "Just a small one," said Nightingale. "So magic is real," I said. "Which makes you a...what?" "A wizard." "Like Harry Potter?" Nightingale sighed. "No," he said. "Not like Harry Potter." "In what way?" "I'm not a fictional character," said Nightingale.

One nightingale in an interfluous wood Satiate the hungry dark with melody.

To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity.

Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.

How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?

Ditty of First Desire In the green morning I wanted to be a heart. A heart. And in the ripe evening I wanted to be a nightingale. A nightingale. (Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.) In the vivid morning I wanted to be myself. A heart. And at the evening's end I wanted to be my voice. A nightingale. Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.

My family grew up in Florence. There I became what I am now, and those are things that cannot be forgotten.

Can she sing? She's practically a Florence Nightingale.

I often compare Margaret Thatcher with Florence Nightingale. She stalks through the wards of our hospitals as a lady with a lamp. Unfortunately, it's a blowlamp.

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

Florence Nightingale. She is one of the most dynamic social entrepreneurs in history.

What else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? If I were a nightingale, I would do the nightingale's part; if I were a swan, I would do as a swan. But now I am a rational creature, and I ought to praise God. This is my work. I do it, nor will I desert my post, so long as I am allowed to keep it. And I ask you to join me in this same song.

For all her active goodness, Florence Nightingale herself was far from being the angelic figure of popular adulation: according to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians she was a self-righteous, domineering amazon, who was ruthless in her compassion, merciless in her philantropy, destructive in friendships, obsessional in her list for power, and demonic in her saintliness.

Agesilaus being invited once to hear a man who admirably imitated the nightingale, he declined, saying he had heard the nightingale itself.

I was brought up in Florence, a beautiful medieval town whose rhythm is completely in antiquity.

When I was 12 years old, I read Nancy Drew mysteries and biographies of Madame Curie and Florence Nightingale and books about girls who love horses or go to nursing school. I belonged to the Girl Scouts and got A's in school and rarely disobeyed my parents. I still kept a collection of Barbie dolls in my room, and I almost never spoke to boys.

If I was a nightingale I would sing like a nightingale; if a swan, like a swan. But since I am a rational creature my role is to praise God.

Elinor Lipman tweets like a nightingale with an eagle eye.

I made music with my friend, who we called Isabella Machine to which I was Florence Robot. When I was about an hour away from my first gig, I still didn't have a name, so I thought 'Okay, I'll be Florence Robot/Isa Machine', before realising that name was so long it'd drive me mad.

What's the biggest thing you've zapped with a fireball?' I asked. 'That would be a tiger,'said Nightingale. 'Well don't tell Greenpeace,' I said. 'They're an endagered species.' 'Not that sort of tiger,' said Nightingale. 'A Panzer-kampfwagen sechs Ausf E.' I stared at him. 'You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?' 'Actually I knocked out two,' said Nightingale. 'I have to admit that the first one took three shots, one to disable the tracks, one through the driver's eye slot and one down the commander's hatch - brewed up rather nicely.

My role models were from track-and-field - Florence Griffith Joyner, Gail Devers.

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning it was not a Word, but a chirrup.

I simply couldn't walk away from [ The Nightingale].

You may learn to imitate a birdcall, but do you experience what the nightingale feels for the rose?

here is no competition of sounds Between a nightingale and a violin.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

In a twilight garden, when a brown nightingale starts singing, what is left to a blonde chicken is to remain silent.

The love-lorn nightingale nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well.

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

In France it was Joan of Arc; in the Crimea it was Florence Nightingale; in the deep south there was Rosa Parks; in India there was Mother Teresa and in Florida there was Katherine Harris.

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.

The mute grain turns to love songs when swallowed by the nightingale.

The heart is pure theater throbbing in its cage palpably as any nightingale.

It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether any one listens to it or not.

Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine melodious truth.

Florence - the city of tranquillity made manifest.

Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.

IN MEMORIAM: FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE She whom we love, our Lady of Compassion, Can never die, for Love forbids her death. Love has bent down in his old kindly fashion, And breathed upon her his immortal breath. On wounded soldiers, in their anguish lying, Her gentle spirit shall descend like rain. Where the white flag with the red cross is flying, There shall she dwell, the vanquisher of pain.

Radio 1 has always championed women; take Annie Nightingale, for example. One of my heroes.

Bismarck was a large persian cat owned by Florence Nightingale.

Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.

The main song I listened to with the 'Firebird' books was 'Breath of Life' by Florence + the Machine.

Florence for me is not simply a city. Florence is a sentiment. And I think it's impossible to be a politician without sentiment.

Music lives within thy lips Like a nightingale in roses.