Zitat des Tages von Florence Nightingale:
Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.
It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.
Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse.
I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.
The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.
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.
I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief... All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it.
A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore.
So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.
The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.
I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth and promotes scrofula, rickets, etc., among the children. People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill, they cannot get well again in it.
Sick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish. They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.
Never speak to an invalid from behind, nor from the door, nor from any distance from him, nor when he is doing anything. The official politeness of servants in these things is so grateful to invalids, that many prefer, without knowing why, having none but servants about them.
Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God's law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.