Have you ever found yourself being taken care of by a great nurse? Being a caring professional in a hospital can often be highly demanding in so many different ways. To celebrate those everyday heroes, we have created a collection of truly inspirational nurse quotes. Enjoy reading.
Nurses are without a doubt part of the health-care industry’s hardest working professionals. They are not only expected to provide flawless medical services but are also expected to take care of an ever-increasing amount of patients. Not to mention that they are heavily underpaid, unfortunately.
“The hospital will never be healthy for patients if it’s not a healthy environment for nurses, where their voices are heard and where they can care for their patients and use the full extent of their knowledge, abilities, and skills. After all, hospitals today have become one big intensive care unit: all patients need intensive caring.”
Tilda Shalof
Aside from working 10- or 12-hour shifts, nurses often have to provide emotional support, aside from their real duties. While doctors are mostly concerned with diagnosing and treating humans, nurses will be at your side to help you get back up.
These inspirational nurse quotes will lift you up when you’ve had a bad day at the hospital
Nurses are the unsung heroes of our society and they definitely deserve to be treated much better in every way imaginable. The following list of nurse quotes is a big shout out to all those amazing individuals who give 110% day after day to help their patients get better.
112 Inspirational Nurse Quotes about Real-Life Heroes
Nurses do not necessarily make headlines but they become everyday heroes for so many patients by caring for them compassionately and with a lot of expertise. To the people they are taking care of, a nurses’ almost limitless effort truly makes a difference.
When it comes to the well-being of a patient, nurses can have a big impact. A nurses’ professional treatment and medical skills play an important part in the recovery of people that are sick. However, it is their kindness, care, attention, and sensitivity that can have an even bigger influence.
Here’s our collection of inspirational nursing quotes
1.
“Nurse: just another word to describe a person strong enough to tolerate anything and soft enough to understand anyone.”
Brittany Wilson
2.
“To do what nobody else will do, a way that nobody else can do, in spite of all we go through; that is to be a nurse.”
Rawsi Williams
3.
“Our job as nurses is to cushion the sorrow and celebrate the job, every day, while we are “just doing our jobs”
Christine Belle
4.
“Bound by paperwork, short on hands, sleep, and energy, nurses are rarely short on caring”
Sharon Hdacek
5.
“Every nurse was drawn to nursing because of a desire to care, to serve, or to help.”
Christina Feist-Heilmeier
6.
“It’s just like nurses in a hospital tend to know more than the doctors most of the time; if you really want to get the answers to a question about court, you should spend more time buttering up the clerks than the judges.”
Jodi Picoult
7.
“Nursing is not for everyone. It takes a very strong, intelligent, and compassionate person to take on the ills of the world with passion and purpose and work to maintain the health and well-being of the planet”
Donna Wilk Cardillo
8.
“Most of all, you need moral courage because nursing is about the pursuit of justice. It requires you to stand up to bullies, to do things that are right but difficult, and to speak your mind even when you are afraid. I wasn’t strong like this when I started out. Nursing made me strong.”
Tilda Shalof
9.
“Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.”
Dag Hammarskjold
10.
“Caring is the essence of nursing”
Jean Watson
Can’t get enough of inspirational nurse quotes? Keep on reading…
11.
“The longer I’m in the profession, the more experiences shape my life, the more amazing colleagues influence me, the more I see the micro and macro power of nursing”
Joni Watson
12.
“It would not be possible to praise nurses too highly”
Stephen Ambrose
13.
“Nurses dispense comfort, compassion, and caring without even a prescription.”
Val Saintsbury
14.
“Nursing is rarely boring or predictable. In few other professions, we are present at life’s most momentous events, from birth to death, from crisis to recovery”
Diane Barnet
15.
“I know I will always be a nurse. My roots in nursing are strong and deep.”
Laurie Barkin
16.
“Nurses are the hospitality of the hospital”
Carrie Latet
17.
“The nurses know the name of your daughter’s stuffed walrus and show her how to make tissue paper flowers to twine around her IV stand. The doctors may be mapping out the war games, but it is the nurses who make the conflict bearable.”
Jodi Picoult
18.
“Nurses help people. And in doing so, we receive the unmatched satisfaction of knowing that we have made a difference to patients and their families”
Dawn Marino
19.
“When you help someone and change his/her life, you are an extraordinary person. When you save someone’s life, you are a hero. When you help people and save their lives every day, you are a nurse.”
Ghassan Shahrour
20.
“Save one life and you’re a hero, save one hundred lives and you’re a nurse”
Peter Hacker
21.
“In its basic form, nursing can be seen as a duty, but beyond the incessant operational activities that lay the foundation of our daily work, the profession is all about grace. Helping people is a noble calling. It is a privilege to serve my fellow human beings.”
Katherine Soh
22.
“”Sometimes I inspire my patients; more often they inspire me.” — Nell Hodgson
23.
“I’m often asked, “Isn’t nursing depressing?” I have experienced real depression in my life, but not because of my profession. Nursing is the opposite of despair; it offers the opportunity to do something about suffering.”
Tilda Shalof
24.
“The character of the nurse is as important as the knowledge she possesses.”
Carolyn Jarvis
25.
“It is not how much you do, but how much love you put in the doing.”
Mother Teresa
Here are some uplifting quotes for nurses
26.
“Nursing is a kind of mania; a fever in the blood; an incurable disease which, once contracted, cannot be got out of the system. If it was not like that, there would be no hospital nurses, for compared dispassionately with other professions, the hours are long, the work hard, and the pay inadequate to the amount of concentrated energy required. A nurse, however, does not view her profession dispassionately. It is too much a part of her.”
Monica Dickens
27.
“A nurse will always give us hope, an angel with a stethoscope”
Terri Guillemets
28.
“There ain’t no feelin’ in the world like takin’ on somebody wilted and near bout gone, and you do what you can, and then all a-sudden the pore thang starts to put out new growth and git well.”
Olive Ann Burns
29.
“I keep thinking about a tale my nurse used to read to me about a bird whose wings are pinned to the ground. In the end, when he finally frees himself, he flies so high he becomes a star. My nurse said the story was about how we all have something that keeps us down.”
Shannon Hale
30.
“Four impressionable years spent in a number of very different hospitals convinced me once for all that nursing, if it is to be done efficiently, requires, more than any other occupation, abundant leisure in colorful surroundings, sufficient money to spend on amusements, agreeable food to re-establish the energy expended, and the removal of anxiety about illness and old age; yet of all skilled professions, it is still the least vitalized by these advantages, still the most oppressed by unnecessary worries, cruelties, hardships, and regulations.”
Vera Brittain
31.
“The nurse smiled and patted my arm. “Don’t give up yet. Sometimes when we think God has written The End, what he really means is The Beginning.”
Rachel Van Dyken
32.
“The most important practical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe-how to observe-what symptoms indicate improvement-what the reverse-which are of importance-which are of none-which are the evidence of neglect-and of what kind of neglect.”
Florence Nightingale
33.
“There are only four kinds of people in the world. Those who have been caregivers. Those who are currently caregivers. Those who will be caregivers, and those who will need a caregiver.”
Rosalyn Carter
34.
“The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.”
Florence Nightingale
35.
“Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.”
Jodi Picoult
Nursing quotes like this restore your faith in your profession
36.
“You have to be strong to be a nurse. You need strong muscles and stamina for the long shifts and heavy lifting, intelligence, and discipline to acquire knowledge and exercise critical thinking.”
Tilda Shalof
37.
“I was taught that the most hardworking nurse is found at the dirtiest part of the clinical ward.”
Israelmore Ayivor
38.
“The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it”
Moses Maimonides
39.
“I have seen a lot of ugly things as a trainee and as a nurse, but they don’t bother me very much. It’s not that the familiarity hardens one; it is rather that one learns the knack of channeling one’s emotions around the ugly thing.”
Theodore Sturgeon
40.
“How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing.”
Joyce Rachelle
41.
“The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.”
Carson McCullers
42.
“The more love and support your child receives, the richer his or her life becomes, and nurses can certainly add to the circle of love surrounding your child.”
Charisse Montgomery
43.
“Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man’s true worth.”
Criss Jami
44.
“When you’re a nurse you know that every day you will touch a life or a life will touch yours”
Florence Nightingale
45.
“The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we’re desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.”
Jodi Picoult
These quotes about nurses truly hit home
46.
“The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest”
William Osler
47.
“When ill, the patient assumes what Parsons called “the sick-role”. Accordingly, the sick person is, on the one hand, excused his or her social responsibilities, but, on the other hand, is expected to desire a return to health and to comply unquestioningly with the directives of medical experts in order to achieve this goal”
Mary Lindemann
48.
“Nurses are there when the last breath is taken, and nurses are there when the first breath is taken”
Christine Bell
49.
“Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection: you are called to a deep interior life perhaps even too mystical prayer, and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others. And if you cannot do so by word, then by example.”
Thomas Merton
50.
“My caregiver mantra is to remember: The only control you have is over the changes you choose to make.”
Nancy L. Kriseman
51.
“Finding a good nurse is not just about checking off a list of skills the nurse can perform; it’s also about finding someone who is a good fit for your home.”
Charisse Montgomery
52.
“Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn’t know possible.”
Tia Walker
53.
“It is the nurses who are the seasoned sergeants – the ones who are there when your baby is shaking with such a high fever she needs to be bathed in ice.”
Jodi Picoult
54.
“”Be the nurse you would want as a patient.”
Unknown
55.
“We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights, she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it.”
Paullina Simons
56.
“Fifteen years has seen many ups and downs at the workplace, but I have enjoyed serving the many patients who come into my care, and have prayed for the souls of those who were on the brink of death.”
Katherine Soh
57.
“Kindness can transform someone’s dark moment with a blaze of light. You’ll never know how much your caring matters. Make a difference for another today.”
Amy Leigh Mercree
58.
“It is impossible to describe exactly what I learn, though I know it lies somewhere between science and art. It is all about the smallest details and understanding how they make the biggest difference.”
Christie Watson
59.
“A nurse is not what you do. It is what you are… I am a nurse. It’s not what I do, it’s what I AM.”
Florence Nightingale
60.
“To care for those who once cared for us is one of the highest honors.”
Tia Walker
These uplifting nurse quotes help you through bad days
61.
“If listening was truly a lifesaving measure, then night shift was a prime time for saving lives. The cover of darkness provided safe cover for the truth to emerge. Confessions, words that people didn’t even know resided in them, flew like startled bats into the night. People confessed to stealing things, to hurting people, to loving some and hating others.”
Karla Theilen
62.
“If Christian scientists had more science and doctors more Christianity, it wouldn’t make any difference which you called in – if you had a good nurse.”
Finley Peter Dunne
63.
“The partnership between nurses and families is based on mutual trust, and defining the boundaries and rules clearly will help everyone involved, especially your child.”
Charisse Montgomery
64.
“Her dream of becoming a nurse was no ordinary yearning: it was the product of a desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem. It recalled for him what it meant to be driven to better yourself, to lay claim to a wider world.”
Amitav Ghosh
65.
“Caring is the essence of nursing.”
Jean Watson
66.
“It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling.”
Andrea Lochen
67.
“She said she was a nurse. I replied that she must have a lot of patience—and patients. I would have said more, but I ran out of homophones.”
Jarod Kintz
68.
“We will meet people on the way: patients, relatives, and staff – people you may recognize already. Because we are all nursed at some point in our lives. We are all nurses.”
Christie Watson
69.
“You come to rely, more than anything else, on first sight. You walk into the room and you think, sick or not sick. Not sick goes home as fast as possible. Sick, you watch. You draw blood, you order X rays, you give them fluids. You are careful, because a little bell went off in your head when you walked into the room and saw them.”
Frank Huyler
70.
“Whether women work in the care sector because the wages are low or whether wages are low because women work there is a question that cannot be answered. But we know that a big reason for economic inequality is that women to a much greater extent work with care.”
Katrine Marçal
71.
“Before you treat a man with a condition, know that not all cures can heal all people. For the chemistry that works on one patient may not work for the next, because even medicine has its own conditions.”
Suzy Kassem
72.
“Caregivers attract caregivers and live in a community of love. They are energized by their caring, fulfilled, and they love life.”
Gary Zukav
73.
“Obtaining a certificate in nursing assistant trains students to provide quality care to residents in nursing homes.”
Cassie Brode
74.
“Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts inwards with untrained nurses.”
Simon Singh
75.
“Nurses are angels in comfortable shoes.”
Unknown
76.
“There is no real bravery in getting paid to save someone’s life. However, there is a large amount of bravery in a nurse break dancing at the hospital’s Christmas party.”
Shannon Alder
77.
“I’m just a girl in a nurse’s uniform, but that doesn’t mean I know how to save these men, and they – they are men in uniforms, but that doesn’t mean they know how to die.”
Marcus Sedgwick
78.
“For having a baby’s sweet face so close to your own, for so long a time as it takes to nurse ’em, is a great tonic for a sad soul.”
Erica Eisdorfer
79.
“The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
80.
“You must never so much think as whether you like it or not, whether it is bearable or not; you must never think of anything except the need, and how to meet it.”
Clara Barton
81.
“Slowly you may have transformed from a helper to one in need of help. It’s important to talk about this, to identify the wounds you carry.”
Jenn Bruer
82.
“We get used to seeing the patients ill; even used to them dying. When they do we get upset if we know them. We can’t get upset for those we don’t know. We have to forget them. We’d all have nervous breakdowns if we didn’t.”
Lucilla Andrews
83.
“A nurse is one who opens the eyes of a newborn & gently closes the eyes of a dying man. It is indeed a high blessing to be the first and last to witness the beginning and end of life.”
Unknown
84.
“Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves.”
Mason Cooley
85.
“Too much profit is being made at the expense of unsuspecting patients.”
Melissa Cady
Here are even more inspirational nurse quotes for you
86.
“Never congratulate a doctor for the fast recovery of a patient.”
Raheel Farooq
87.
“The simple act of caring is heroic.”
Edward Albert
88.
“I’m a nurse. I help sick people. I mostly help the people who are already dying, trying to make their last days comfortable.”
Delilah S. Dawson
89.
“Before you diagnose any sickness, make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart. For the emotions in a man’s moon or sun, can point to the sickness in any one of his other parts.”
Suzy Kassem
90.
“Was it not all a dead-end occupation, nursing back to health men to be patched up and returned to the trenches, or a man to be patched up, court-martialled, and shot? The difference lay in the Ideal.”
Ellen N. La Motte
91.
“The life so short, the craft so long to learn.”
Hippocrates
92.
“As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.”
Hippocrates
93.
“Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn’t know possible.”
Tia Walker
94.
“Nurses: one of the few blessings of being ill.”
Sara Moss-Wolfe
95.
“Nurses are a unique kind. They have this insatiable need to care for others, which is both their greatest strength and fatal flaw.”
Dr. Jean Watson
96.
“The worst thing about working as a caregiver is not what you might think. It’s not the lifting and cleaning, the medicines and wipes, and the distant but somehow always perceptible smell of disinfectant. It’s not even the fact that most people assume you’re only doing it because you really aren’t smart enough to do anything else. It’s the fact that when you spend all day in proximity to someone, there is no escape from their moods. Or your own.”
Jojo Moyes
97.
“Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.”
Emory Austin
98.
“Caregivers had to take care of themselves, and part of that meant having a life beyond whatever illness had put them in their cole.”
J.R. Ward
99.
“Nurses encompasses an art, a humanistic orientation, a feeling for the value of the individual, and an intuitive sense of ethics, and of the appropriateness of action taken”
Myrtle Aydelotte
100.
“Affirmations are our mental vitamins, providing the supplementary positive thoughts we need to balance the barrage of negative events and thoughts we experience daily.”
Tia Walker
101.
“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty – it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
Mother Teresa
102.
“Time, that aged nurse, rocked me to patience.”
John Keats
103.
“You can do anything, but not everything.”
David Allen
104.
“Hope requires waiting. Waiting requires patience.”
Sharon Weil
105.
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the things which you think you cannot do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
106.
“Everyone has creative potential. Creativity involves using your imagination and inventiveness. Your unique expression of yourself is your creativity… Creativity can be magic when visiting people who are ill.”
Patch Adams
107.
“One person caring about another represents life’s greatest value.”
Jim Rohn
108.
“It’s true that laughter really is cheap medicine. It’s a prescription anyone can afford. And best of all, you can fill it right now.”
Steve Goodier
109.
“In fact the English nurses had spent much of their time stuffing mattresses, stirring gruel, and standing at washtubs, but Lib didn’t want the nun to mistake her for an ignorant menial. That was what nobody understood: saving lives often came down to getting a latrine pipe unplugged.”
Emma Donoghue
110.
“The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, but now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.”
Stevie Smith
111.
“Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. „
Alan Wilson Watts
112.
“You can’t change laws without first changing human nature.”
Nurse Greta
Bonus
“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”
Voltaire
I hope you enjoyed this collection of nurse quotes.
If you happen to know a nurse, let her know how much of an impact she has on the world. Being a nurse is such a difficult job but that the same time they definitely help to make this world a much better place. Reason enough to thank them or even give them a nice hug for everything they did for you or your loved ones. And if you are a nurse yourself, thank you so much for everything.
Stay victorious!
