64 quotes
At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?
Cassandra (1860)
The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organisation do not permit them to act.
Cassandra (1860)
And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?
Cassandra (1860)
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.
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.
By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it.
Cassandra (1860)
There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.
Cassandra (1860)
The martyr sacrifices herself (himself in a few instances) entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she (or he) makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.
Forever Yours (1990)
Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
Cassandra (1860)
To have no food for our heads no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing?
Cassandra (1860)
No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me.
The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913)
Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God.
Cassandra (1860)
Passion, intellect, moral activity — these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied.
Cassandra (1860)
In it and in the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a petition. There is never a word of the theory that God's dealings with us are to show His "power"; still less of the theory that "of His own good pleasure" He has " predestined" any souls to eternal damnation.
Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages (1873)
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.
Notes on Nursing (1860)
When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind — with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?
Cassandra (1860)
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.
This is what I call real sympathy.
The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913)
And they don't know what I feel.
The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913)
Religious men are and must be heretics now — for we must not pray, except in a "form" of words, made beforehand — or think of God but with a prearranged idea.
Cassandra (1860)