Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

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
There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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
The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain — the hardest and most iron-bound as well.

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

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The first duty of a human is to assume the right functional relationship to society — more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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
It becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"You told us about your dentists," she said, at length, "those quaintly specialized persons who spend their lives filling little holes in other persons' teeth — even in children's teeth sometimes."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
There's a whining at the threshold —
There's a scratching at the floor —
To work! To work! In Heaven's name!
The wolf is at the door!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The labour 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
And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A family unity which is only bound together with a table-cloth is of questionable value.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, 'This is our best thought, go on, think farther!' then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. 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
In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold.... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.

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

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Legitimate sex-competition brings out all that is best in man.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman