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A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.

Florence Nightingale

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Florence Nightingale
Age: 90 †
Born: 1820
Born: May 12
Died: 1910
Died: August 13
Nurse
Politician
Statistician
Teacher
Writer
Florence
Tuscany
Nightingale Florence
Lady with the Lamp
Angel of Crimea
Miss Smith
Average
Habit
Inveterate
Taking
Averages
Often
Relapse
Misleading
Mislead
Observing
Equally

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diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.
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Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited-though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air-of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.
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There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.
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I can expect no sympathy or help from my family.
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The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the aid of Statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service.
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Let whoever is in charge keep this simple question in her head (not, how can I always do this right thing myself, but) how can I provide for this right thing to be always done?
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All disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed.
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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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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.
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Statistics is the most important science in the whole world: for upon it depends the practical application of every other science and of every art: the one science essential to all political and social administration, all education, all organization based on experience, for it only gives results of our experience.
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Nature alone cures. ... what nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.
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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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Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind, which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better understood than they were two thousand years ago.
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In a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut.
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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.
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Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.
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Heaven is neither a place nor a time.
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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.
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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.
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Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.
Florence Nightingale