Top 50 Dorothy Canfield Quotes
#2. The minute your group gets so big you don't know anybody in it and they don't know you, there's hell to pay.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#9. The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#10. There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#11. Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#13. One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#14. History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#16. There's no such thing as luck. Nothing ever just happens to anybody ... nothing can really happen to a person till he lets it happen.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#17. I declare! Sometimes it seems to me that every time a new piece of machinery comes into the door some of our wits fly out the window!
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#20. There's no healthy life possible without some sensual feeling between the husband and wife, but there's nothing in the world more awful than married life when it's the only common ground.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#21. There are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#22. The encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#23. If we could learn how to utilize all the intelligence and patent good will children are born with, instead of ignoring much of it - why - there might be enough to go around! There might be enough to solve our alarming human problems, to put an end to poverty, to stop waging wars.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#24. You think religion is what's inside a little building filled with pretty lights from stained glass windows. But it's not. It's wings! Wings!
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#26. It was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#27. Father sticks to it that anything that promises to pay too much can't help being risky.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#28. What's the use of inventing a better system as long as there just aren't enough folks with sense to go around?
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#29. Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#30. On New Year's Day every calendar, large and small, has the same number of dates. But we soon learn that the years are of very different lengths.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#31. Taking somebody's sacrifices is like taking counterfeit money. You're only the poorer.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#32. The most elementary experience of life proves that the effects of compulsion last exactly as long as the physical or moral club can be applied.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#33. If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#34. Perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#35. Don't let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you know that - and it's true.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#37. Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip?
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#38. The richness and endless variety of human relationships ... that's what authors, even the finest and greatest, only succeed in hinting at. It's a hopeless business, like trying to dip up the ocean with a tea-spoon.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#39. How he loathed his life-long slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative opposed to every spontaneous impulse. "It's the clock that is the nay-sayer to life," he thought
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#40. Not a thing had happened the way she had planned, no, not a single thing! But it seemed to her she had never been so happy in her life.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#41. Never since the dawn of human history, as far as I can find out, did people long settled in any region give a friendly welcome to newcomers. One of the disagreeable traits of our human nature seems to be to dislike on sight people who come later than the first settlers.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#42. Oh, yes, of course I like music, too. Very much. It's so pleasant of an evening, especially when made by your friends at home. I often say I like it better than cards. Though I must say I do like a good game of bridge.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#43. I never did,' said the little girl, but in a less doubtful tone than she had ever used with that phrase so familiar to her. A dim notion was growing in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she couldn't.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#44. Everyone bowed to that unwritten law of family life which ordains that, in the long run, everyone submerges his personal preference in the effort to conform to that of the member of the circle who complains most loudly and is most difficult to satisfy.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#46. It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#47. She was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room. That was where Henry had held the platter tilted as he carried the steak in yesterday. And yet if she had warned him once about that, she had a thousand times!
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#48. Almost anything is enough to keep alive someone who wishes nothing for himself but time to write music ...
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#49. What better can any of us do than to reach for our own stars ... and know which they are?
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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