Top 67 Gertrude Atherton Quotes
#1. Books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive.
Gertrude Atherton
#2. A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains ...
Gertrude Atherton
#4. Better extirpate the whole breed, root and branch. And this, unless the German people come to their senses, is what we propose to do.
Gertrude Atherton
#5. There is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.
Gertrude Atherton
#6. A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.
Gertrude Atherton
#9. We never care to know new people unless we are sure we shall like them.
Gertrude Atherton
#11. Her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.
Gertrude Atherton
#12. It took me some time to learn that although every one secretly cherishes the ambition to be 'put in a book,' no one is ever satisfied with anything save incense, butter, and honey, unrelieved by salt or spice.
Gertrude Atherton
#13. No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class ...
Gertrude Atherton
#14. The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.
Gertrude Atherton
#15. Orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.
Gertrude Atherton
#16. A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?
Gertrude Atherton
#18. Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent.
Gertrude Atherton
#19. The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.
Gertrude Atherton
#20. I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.
Gertrude Atherton
#21. No matter how hard a man may labor, some woman is always in the background of his mind. She is the one reward of virtue.
Gertrude Atherton
#22. New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.
Gertrude Atherton
#24. Genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.
Gertrude Atherton
#25. Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.
Gertrude Atherton
#26. Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.
Gertrude Atherton
#27. The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.
Gertrude Atherton
#28. It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.
Gertrude Atherton
#30. I see no present solution of a great and intricate problem but that the rich should realize their duty to the poor.
Gertrude Atherton
#31. Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.
Gertrude Atherton
#32. When I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.
Gertrude Atherton
#33. The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.
Gertrude Atherton
#34. Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.
Gertrude Atherton
#35. The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. ("The Striding Place")
Gertrude Atherton
#36. California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices ...
Gertrude Atherton
#37. The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.
Gertrude Atherton
#39. Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.
Gertrude Atherton
#40. It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the 'ancestral piles' of England.
Gertrude Atherton
#41. Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.
Gertrude Atherton
#44. There is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.
Gertrude Atherton
#45. There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.
Gertrude Atherton
#46. I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.
Gertrude Atherton
#48. [Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
Gertrude Atherton
#49. The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.
Gertrude Atherton
#50. If there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters?
Gertrude Atherton
#52. Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!
Gertrude Atherton
#53. The irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.
Gertrude Atherton
#54. All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.
Gertrude Atherton
#55. To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.
Gertrude Atherton
#56. Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.
Gertrude Atherton
#58. Power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.
Gertrude Atherton
#60. Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.
Gertrude Atherton
#61. The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.
Gertrude Atherton
#62. The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.
Gertrude Atherton
#63. It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.
Gertrude Atherton
#65. Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.
Gertrude Atherton
#66. Oh, what is young love! The urge of the race. A blaze that ends in babies or ashes.
Gertrude Atherton
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