Top 100 Charlotte Perkins Quotes

#1. Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1905
#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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #7465
#3. Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #20111
#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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #45578
#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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #80914
#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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #104053
#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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #136124
#8. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #136521
#9. The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #171699
#10. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #176920
#11. Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #178565
#12. The people people have for friends
Your common sense appall
But the people people marry
Are the queerest folk of all.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #187947
#13. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #193826
#14. California is a state peculiarly addicted to swift enthusiasms. It is a seed-bed of all manner of cults and theories, taken up, and dropped, with equal speed.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #198734
#15. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #200201
#16. The mother- poor invaded soul- finds even the bathroom door no bar to hammering little hands.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #202801
#17. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #207432
#18. In great cities where people of ability abound, there is always a feverish urge to keep ahead, to set the pace, to adopt each new fashion in thought and theory as well as in dress - or undress.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #221975
#19. A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #223671
#20. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #224073
#21. It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #232611
#22. The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #258909
#23. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #270909
#24. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #301062
#25. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #311585
#26. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #340382
#27. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #351485
#28. Those who too patiently serve as props sometimes underrate the possibilities of the vine.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #366036
#29. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #370843
#30. Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #403913
#31. The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #404438
#32. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #409865
#33. The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #414338
#34. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #433139
#35. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #438943
#36. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #441663
#37. A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #485228
#38. The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #495216
#39. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #513264
#40. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #533916
#41. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #535498
#42. A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #539832
#43. When I see them knit,' Terry said, 'I can almost call them feminine.'
'That doesn't prove anything,' Jeff promptly replied. 'Scotch shepherds knit
always knitting.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #548393
#44. Said I, in scorn all burning hot,In rage and anger high,You ignominious idiot,Those wings are made to fly!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #558523
#45. To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #561621
#46. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #606329
#47. The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #608704
#48. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #612172
#49. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #617987
#50. But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #619697
#51. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #621151
#52. For men obsessed with women's underwear, a course in washing, ironing and mending is recommended.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #625883
#53. (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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #647453
#54. Life is a verb, not a noun.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #653427
#55. However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #657505
#56. When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #660627
#57. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #674635
#58. Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #675743
#59. In our steady insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that they were allowed to men and forbidden to women.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #677172
#60. I do not want to be a fly,I want to be a worm!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #701195
#61. [The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #734951
#62. Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #738935
#63. Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #748342
#64. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #761053
#65. She is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has accumulated through the centuries; she is opposed from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of anything real.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #810425
#66. A concept is stronger than a fact.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #813469
#67. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #814095
#68. There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #838084
#69. If fifty men did all the work, / And gave the price to five, / And let those five make all the rules - / You'd say the fifty men were fools, / Unfit to be alive.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #882148
#70. They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #885218
#71. The home is the center and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #898020
#72. Until mothers earn their livings, women will not

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #900241
#73. At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #913669
#74. To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature; to make beautiful things has more.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #931312
#75. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #951429
#76. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #982460
#77. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1013959
#78. I ran against a Prejudice that quite cut off the view.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1052975
#79. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1063536
#80. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1065990
#81. I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1098471
#82. The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1099377
#83. I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1106352
#84. Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1140699
#85. (At the end of the nineteenth century, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman complained that housework was the only job that had not been modernized.)

Ann Jones

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1146578
#86. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1168862
#87. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1169886
#88. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1175204
#89. New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1175968
#90. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1179048
#91. To speak broadly, the troubles of life as we find them are mainly traceable to the heart or the purse.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1195671
#92. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1197924
#93. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1199317
#94. The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain-the hardest and most iron-bound as well.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1216027
#95. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1217145
#96. In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1224416
#97. In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1238776
#98. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1254387
#99. 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

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1255078
#100. There's heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty - for growth.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Quotes #1313945

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top