“Our business is, I think, to understand, not to judge.”
As quoted in Florence Nightingale's Theology: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2002) by Lynn McDonald, pps. 177-179 (Add Mss 45783 ff65-67)
Context: Perhaps it is not true to speak of God as a judge at all, or of his judgements. There does not seem to be really any evidence that His worlds are places of trial but rather schools, place of training, or that He is a judge but rather a Teacher, a Trainer, not in the imperfect sense in which men are teachers, but in the sense of His contriving and adapting His whole universe for one purpose of training every intelligent being to be perfect. … I think God would not be the Almighty, the All-Wise, the All-Good, if he were the judge, in the sense that the evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians impute judgement to him. … Our business is, I think, to understand, not to judge. What He does, as far as we know, to rule by law down to the most infinitesimally small portion of His universe, not to judge.
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Florence Nightingale 81
English social reformer and statistician, and the founder o… 1820–1910Related quotes
The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625), Of Judicature
Organic and Inorganic
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter
Context: Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals’ and plants’ business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.
Organic and Inorganic
Source: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter
Source: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. XVI.
“In the hurry of business, the most able Judges are liable to err.”
Cotton v. Thurland (1793), 5 T. R. 409.
What's Going On.
Song lyrics, What's Going On (1971)
Michael Gerber (1986), E, Myth, cited in: Manager's magazine, 1986. p. 57
Variant: We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.
Source: A Spy in the House of Love