Florence Nightingale Zitate

seite 3

„Gäbe es niemanden, der unzufrieden wäre mit dem, was er hat, würde die Welt niemals besser werden.“

„Kluge und humane Behandlung des Patienten ist der beste Schutz vor Infektionen.“

„Wahre Religion ist, keinen anderen Willen zu haben als den Willen Gottes.“

„Die einzigen englischen Patienten, denen ich je begegnet bin, die einen Tee verweigerten, sind Typhusfälle gewesen; und das erste Zeichen, dass sie gesund wurden, war ihr Verlangen nach Tee.“

„Herz, du verlierst sehr viel, wenn du nichts aushältst!“

„Für was ist Mystik? Ist es nicht der Versuch, sich Gott zu nähern, nicht durch Riten oder Zeremonien, sondern durch innere Veranlagung? Ist es nicht nur ein hartes Wort für „Das Königreich des Himmels ist im Inneren“? Der Himmel ist weder ein Ort noch eine Zeit.“

„Wahre Religion ist, keinen anderen Willen zu haben als den Willen Gottes.“

„Und so wird die Welt durch den Tod eines jeden, der die Entwicklung seiner besonderen Gaben (die nicht für die selbstsüchtige Befriedigung, sondern für die Verbesserung dieser Welt gedacht waren) der Konventionalität opfern muß, zurückgestellt.“

„Besser, zehn Mal zu sterben, in der Brandung stehend, den Weg in eine neue Welt anzukündigen, als müßig am Ufer zu stehen.“

„Es mag ein seltsames Prinzip sein, als erste Anforderung in einem Krankenhaus zu formulieren, dass es den Kranken nichts anhaben soll.“

„Wenn man mit Flügeln geboren wird, sollte man alles dazu tun, sie zum Fliegen zu benutzen.“

„Was die Schrecken des Krieges sind, kann sich niemand vorstellen. Sie sind keine Wunden und Blut und Fieber, fleckig und schwach oder Durchfall, chronisch und akut, Kälte und Hitze und Hunger. Sie sind Betrunkenheit, betrunkene Brutalität, Demoralisierung und Unordnung der Untergebenen… Eifersucht, Gemeinheit, Gleichgültigkeit, selbstsüchtige Brutalität der Vorgesetzten.“

„Ich stehe am Altar der Ermordeten, und während ich lebe, kämpfe ich für ihre Sache.“

„Ich kann den Krieg mit jedem Mann heraushalten.“

„Herz, du verlierst sehr viel, wenn du nichts aushältst!“

„Ich schreibe meinen Erfolg dem zu – ich habe nie eine Entschuldigung gegeben oder genommen.“

„Du fragst mich, warum ich nichts schreibe…. Ich denke, seine Gefühle verschwenden sich in Worten, sie sollten alle zu Handlungen und zu Handlungen destilliert werden, die zu Ergebnissen führen.“

„Askese ist die Kleinigkeit eines Enthusiasten mit seiner Macht, ein pueriler Zusammenhalt mit seiner Selbstsucht oder seiner Eitelkeit, wenn es keinen ausreichend großen Gegenstand gibt, um das Erste einzusetzen oder das Letzte zu überwinden.“

„Frauen haben nie eine halbe Stunde in ihrem Leben (außer vorher oder danach, wenn jemand im Haus ist), dass sie ihre eigene anrufen können, ohne Angst zu haben, jemanden zu beleidigen oder zu verletzen. Warum sitzen die Leute so spät auf oder stehen seltener so früh auf? Nicht, weil der Tag nicht lang genug ist, sondern weil sie keine Zeit am Tag für sich haben.“

“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.”

“To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.”

“You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.”

“In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. … Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. … They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?”

“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.”

“The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for — its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.”

“It seems as if the female spirit of the world were mourning everlastingly over blessings, not lost, but which she has never had, and which, in her discouragement she feels that she never will have, they are so far off.”

“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.”

“Suffering, sad "female humanity!" What are these feelings which they are taught to consider as disgraceful, to deny to themselves? What form do the Chinese feet assume when denied their proper development? If the young girls of the "higher classes," who never commit a false step, whose justly earned reputations were never sullied even by the stain which the fruit of mere "knowledge of good and evil" leaves behind, were to speak, and say what are their thoughts employed upon, their thoughts, which alone are free, what would they say?”

“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.”

“Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.”

“Nothing can well be imagined more painful than the present position of woman, unless, on the one hand, she renounces all outward activity and keeps herself within the magic sphere, the bubble of her dreams; or, on the other, surrendering all aspiration, she gives herself to her real life, soul and body. For those to whom it is possible, the latter is best; for out of activity may come thought, out of mere aspiration can come nothing.”

“I 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.”

“A girl, if she has any pride, is so ashamed of having anything she wishes to say out of the hearing of her own family, she thinks it must be something so very wrong, that it is ten to one, if she have the opportunity of saying it, that she will not.
And yet she is spending her life, perhaps, in dreaming of accidental means of unrestrained communion.”

“Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement — they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.”

“Men and women meet now to be idle. Is it extraordinary that they do not know each other, and that, in their mutual ignorance, they form no surer friendships? Did they meet to do something together, then indeed they might form some real tie.
But, as it is, they are not there, it is only a mask which is there — a mouth-piece of ready-made sentences about the "topics of the day"; and then people rail against men for choosing a woman "for her face"”

“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.”

“I have had a larger responsibility of human lives than ever man or woman had before. And I attribute my success to this — I never gave or took an excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act and they make excuses.”

“It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality in hospitals, especially in those of large crowded cities, is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated out of hospital would lead us to expect. The knowledge of this fact first induced me to examine into the influence exercised by hospital construction on the duration and death-rate of cases received into the wards; and it led me to lay before the Social Science Association a paper reprinted with the present title. Since the publication of the first edition of that paper, great advances have been made in the adoption of sound principles of hospital construction; and there are already a number of examples of new hospitals realizing all, or nearly all, the conditions required for the successful treatment of the sick and maimed poor.”

“I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.”