Nightingale, Florence (Florence Nightingale)

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
-- Florence Nightingale

Poetry and imagination begin life.
-- Florence Nightingale

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived. The stimulus, the training, the time, are all three wanting to us; or, in other words, the means and inducements are not there.

Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. In looking round we are struck with the power of the organisations we see, not with their want of power. Now and then, it is true, we are conscious that there is an inferior organisation, but, in general, just the contrary.
-- Florence Nightingale

At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work.

And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?
-- Florence Nightingale

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
-- Florence Nightingale

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