To have no food for our heads no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing? If we have no food for the body, how do we cry out, how all the world hears of it, how all the newspapers talk of it, with a paragraph headed in great capital letters, DEATH FROM STARVATION! But suppose one were to put a paragraph in the Times, Death of Thought from Starvation, or Death of Moral Activity from Starvation, how people would stare, how they would laugh and wonder! One would think we had no heads nor hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of any consequence.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Nightingale contrasts society's concern for physical starvation with its indifference to the starvation of intellect and moral activity.
- In plain terms
- People care when bodies starve but ignore when minds and morals go without nourishment.
- What can you take from it?
- Recognize that intellectual and moral deprivation are forms of starvation too.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- What does your mind need to stay nourished?
- Who decides what needs are urgent?
Another view
The analogy between physical and intellectual hunger may oversimplify complex needs.
More from Florence Nightingale
That man and woman have an equality of duties and rights is accepted by woman even less than by man. Behind his destiny woman must annihilate herself, must be …
Permalink to quote #39 Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.
Permalink to quote #41 We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master. The governes…
Permalink to quote #38
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