Top 100 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes
#2. Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#4. Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#5. It would have saved trouble had I remained Perkins from the first, this changing of women's names is a nuisance we are now happily outgrowing.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#6. This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place ... and the world waits while she powders her nose.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#7. Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#8. The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#9. So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more, I saw at last its meaning and its place; Not the blind passion of the brooding past, But Mother
the World's Mother
come at last, To love as she had never loved before
To feed and guard and teach the human race.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#10. Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#11. The people people have for friends
Your common sense appall
But the people people marry
Are the queerest folk of all.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#12. Shall you complain who feed the world? Who clothe the world? Who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world, Of what the world may do? As from this hour You use your power, The world must follow you!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#13. I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#14. Grateful return for happiness conferred is not the method of exchange in a partnership. The comfort a man takes with his wife is not in the nature of a business partnership, nor are her frugality and industry.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#16. To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#17. Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#18. The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#19. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#20. The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life-of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action-in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#22. The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#24. You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#25. He says no one can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#26. We grovel and "worship" and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#27. One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#28. Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?"
"Why, no," she said. "Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them - and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#29. All social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#30. Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#31. A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#32. To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#33. As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#35. We have built into the constitution of the human race the habit and desire of taking, as divorced from its natural precursor and concomitant of making.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#36. But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#37. The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society
more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#38. (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#40. It is not for nothing that a man's best friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#41. Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#42. Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#44. John doesn't know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.
It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#48. John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#49. To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America ... who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#50. The difference is great between one's outside "life," the things which happen to one, incidents, pains and pleasures, and one's "living."
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#52. There are the two of you - the two sexes- to love and help one another. It must be a rich and wonderful world
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#53. If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages
not alimony.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#57. Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#58. The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#59. Will you excuse us all," [Jeff] said, "if we admit that we find it hard to believe? There is no such-possibility-in the rest of the world."
Have you no kind of life where [asexual reproduction] is possible?" asked Zava.
"Why, yes-some low forms, of course."
"How low-or how high, rather?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#60. New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#61. He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#62. To speak broadly, the troubles of life as we find them are mainly traceable to the heart or the purse.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#63. To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for human development - the full use of one's best faculties - this is the health and happiness for both man and woman.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#64. The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain-the hardest and most iron-bound as well.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#65. The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them-on the race. You see, we are MOTHERS, she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#67. And, as I traveled farther and farther, exploring the rich, sweet soul of her, my sense of pleasant friendship became but a broad foundation for such height, such breadth, such interlocked combination of feeling as left me fairly blinded with the wonder of it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#68. Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#69. There's heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty - for growth.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#70. the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#71. A million million worlds that move in peace;A million mighty laws that never cease;And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds.They sleep beneath the sodAnd trust in God.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#72. It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#73. Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#74. But only this-that people who are utterly ignorant will believe anything-which you certainly knew before.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#75. I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.
I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#76. The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#77. Woman in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#79. Most men's eyes, when you look at them critically, are not like that. They may look at you very expressively, but when you look at them, just as features, they are not very nice.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#80. [Warfare is] maleness in its absurdest extremes. Here is to be studied the whole gamut of basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of glorious ostentation, with the loudest accompaniment of noise.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#84. There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#87. There should be an end to the bitterness of feeling which has arisen between the sexes in this century.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#89. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#92. When we use our past merely as a guide-book, and concentrate our noble emotions on the present and future, we shall improve more rapidly.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#93. The fact that women in the home have shut themselves away from the thought and life of the world has done much to retard progress.We fill the world with the children of 20th century A.D. fathers and 20th century B.C. mothers.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#94. It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#95. In business life, that is, in its material processes, we eagerly accept the new. In social life, in all our social processes, we piously, valiantly, obdurately, maintain the old.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#97. Those "feminine charms" we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity - developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process. But
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#98. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#99. It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#100. It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should life the world forward. That is what they are for.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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