Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a first-year student, nursing can be a rewarding profession, but it can also be a challenging one. Between working with demanding doctors, healing patients, and trying to reassure their worried families, it’s easy to find yourself drained and in need of a pick-me-up.
If you’re feeling down and out, a little inspiration and motivation can do a wonderful job of picking you up and getting you through your shift.
Here are 50 inspirational nursing quotes and 30 famous motivational quotes to inspire you, put a smile on your face, and add a little sunshine to your day.
Top 50 Inspirational Nurse Quotes
“America’s nurses are the beating heart of our medical system.”
– Barack Obama
“I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed a nurse them.”
– Clara Barton
“Nurses have come a long way in a few short decades. In the past our attention focused on physical, mental and emotional healing. Now we talk of healing your life, healing the environment and healing the planet.”
– Lynn Keegan
“Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.”
– Florence Nightingale
“Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.”
– Dag Hammarskjold
“The character of the nurse is as important as the knowledge she possesses.”
– Carolyn Jarvis
“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”
– John Ruskin
“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”
– Dale Carnegie
“Habits are the daughters of action, but then they nurse their mother, and produce daughters after her image, but far more beautiful and prosperous.”
– Jeremy Taylor
“A nurse is compassion in scrubs.”
– Lexie Saige
“I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
– E.E. Hale
“How can anybody hate nurses? Nobody hates nurses. The only time you hate a nurse is when they’re giving you an enema.”
– Warren Beatty
“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
“Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”
– Emily Dickinson
“The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.”
– William Osler
“Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.”
– Walt Whitman
“Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“For the last 3 years, we have celebrated National Nurses Week. Beginning on May 6, we will once again have the opportunity to truly commend the nursing community for their contributions to our national health delivery system.”
– Nathan Deal
“A nurse will always give us hope, an angel with a stethoscope.”
– Carrie Latet
“The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.”
– William Osler
“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”
– The Bible
“It would not be possible to praise nurses too highly.”
– Stephen Ambrose
“Being a nurse means to hold all your own tears and start drawing smiles on people’s faces.”
– Dana Basem
“Bound by paperwork, short on hands, sleep and energy… nurses are rarely short on caring.”
– Sharon Hudacek
“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something, and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”
– Helen Keller
“Nurses, one of the few blessings of being ill.”
– Sara Moss-Wolfe
“God appoints our graces to be nurses to other men’s weaknesses.”
– Henry Ward Beecher
“That is what I’m looking forward to the most, practical learning. I want to be a registered nurse so getting to talk to people who already work in those jobs can really teach me what to expect when I get out in the real world.”
– Angela Carter
“It is not how much you do, but how much love you put in the doing.”
– Mother Theresa
“Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.”
– Dr. Carl Sagan
“When I think about all the patients and their loved ones that I have worked with over the years, I know most of them don’t remember me nor I them, but I do know that I gave a little piece of myself to each of them and they to me and those threads make up the beautiful tapestry in my mind that is my career in nursing.”
– Donna Wilk Cardillo
“I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.”
– Albert Schweitzer
“Our job as nurses is to cushion the sorrow and celebrate the job, everyday, while we are ‘just doing our jobs’.”
– Christine Belle
“My experience as a school nurse taught me that we need to make a concerted effort, all of us, to increase physical fitness activity among our children and to encourage all Americans to adopt a healthier diet that includes fruits and vegetables, but there is more.”
– Lois Capps
“Where there is love there is life.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief…and unspeakable love.”
– Washington Irving
“Nurses are the hospitality of the hospital.”
– Carrie Latet
“Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation, as any painter’s or sculptor’s work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God’s spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.”
– Florence Nightingale
“I was a weirdo to want to be in show business. Most kids wanted to be teachers or nurses.”
– Nell Carter
“It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.”
– Quintilian
“Nurses dispense comfort, compassion, and caring without even a prescription.”
– Val Saintsbury
“Nurses are an integral component of the health care system, and it is important that we recognize the over 2.7 million registered nurses for the significant work that they do.”
– Nathan Deal
“Nurses serve their patients in the most important capacities. We know that they serve as our first lines of communication when something goes wrong or when we are concerned about health.”
– Lois Capps
“Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.”
– Michel de Montaigne
“My sister is a nurse and saves people’s lives.”
– Nicholas Lea
“This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.”
– Harold Pinter
“I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.”
– James A. Michener
“Better understanding of the natural world not only enhances all of us as human beings, but can also be harnessed for the better good, leading to improved health and quality of life.”
– Paul Nurse
“Nursing 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
“We often think of nursing as giving meds on time, checking an X-ray to see if the doctor needs to be called, or taking an admission at 2:00 a.m. with a smile on our faces. Too often, we forget all the other things that make our job what it truly is—caring and having a desire to make a difference.”
– Erin Pettengill
Top 25+Famous Motivational Quotes
“To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, that is to have succeeded.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
– Calvin Coolidge
“People will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel!”
– Maya Angelou
“I know what I have to do, and I’m going to do whatever it takes. If I do it, I’ll come out a winner, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else does.”
– Florence Griffith Joyner
“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.”
– George Washington Carver
“A leader is a dealer in hope.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
“Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing, it’s when you’ve had everything to do and you’ve done it!”
– Margaret Thatcher
“Whatever you are, be a good one.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”
– Norman Vincent Peale
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
– Mark Twain
“The secret of joy in work is contained in one word – excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.”
– Pearl Buck
“Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep you habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep you values positive because your values become your destiny.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.”
– Simone de Beauvoir
“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”
– Arnold Schwarzenegger
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
– John Quincy Adams
“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”
– Vince Lombardi
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty.”
– William J. Bennett
“If we did all the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.”
– Thomas Edison
“Enter every activity without giving mental recognition to the possibility of defeat. Concentrate on your strengths, instead of your weaknesses… on your powers, instead of your problems.”
– Paul J. Meyer
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
– Aristotle
“High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
– George Orwell
“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”
– Lance Armstrong
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”
– Lyndon Johnson
“Others will underestimate us, for although we judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, others judge us only by what we have already done.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Life is what we make it. Always has been, always will be.”
– Grandma Moses
“You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.”
– Anthony Robbins
“A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”
– Harry Truman
“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”
– John Ruskin
These quotes can do wonders for your psyche and give you the boost you need to make the most of your day. While each of these quotes can inspire and motivate, try picking one or two out that really speak to you and writing them on an index card. Whenever you’re feeling a little down and out, simply pull it out of your purse or wallet and voila, instant motivation and inspiration. Here’s to a long and happy nursing career!
