The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

—Florence Nightingale

About Florence Nightingale

Portrait of Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale () (12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She...

More quotations from Florence Nightingale

You ask me why I do not write something.… I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

—Florence Nightingale

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.

—Florence Nightingale

success excuses giving up

More quotations tagged with “writing”

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.

—Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

—Elaine Liner

Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell.

—Edward Gibbon

She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

—Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

—Edith Wharton

History

11 Jul 2015 Added