“This is what I call real sympathy.”
Letter to Madame Mohl (13 December 1861) http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA13&dq=Women+have+no+sympathy+and+my+experience+of+women+is+almost+as+large+as+Europe.&client=firefox-a&id=totpAAAAMAAJ#v=onepage&q=Women%20have%20no%20sympathy%20and%20my%20experience%20of%20women%20is%20almost%20as%20large%20as%20Europe.&f=false, pp. 13-15
The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913)
Context: I have read half your book thro' and I am immensely charmed by it. But some things I disagree with and more I do not understand. This does not apply to the characters, but to your conclusions, e. g. you say "women are more sympathetic than men." Now if I were to write a book out of my experience I should begin Women have no sympathy. Yours is the tradition. Mine is the conviction of experience. I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions. Now look at my experience of men. A statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century, out of sympathy with me, remodels his whole life and policy — learns a science the driest, the most technical, the most difficult, that of administration, as far as it concerns the lives of men, — not, as I learnt it, in the field from stirring experience, but by writing dry regulations in a London room by my sofa with me. This is what I call real sympathy.
