Florence Nightingale Quotes
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Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.
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No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this - 'devoted and obedient.' This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.
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Though he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice.
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Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.
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You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.
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Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God - to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only what is right, or what is the will of God (the same question), then we may truly be said to live in His light.
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What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine - they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine - they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.
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Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again - the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.