“At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?”

—  Florence Nightingale

Cassandra (1860)
Context: 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?

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Florence Nightingale photo
Florence Nightingale 81
English social reformer and statistician, and the founder o… 1820–1910

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