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
The people people have for friends Your common sense appall, But the people people marry Are the queerest folk of all.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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
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
Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.

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
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
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire — and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period — has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.

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

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 religious need of the human mind remains alive, never more so, but it demands a teaching which can be understood. Slowly an apprehension of the intimate, usable power of God is growing among us, and a growing recognition of the only worth-while application of that power — in the improvement of the world.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Not woman, but the condition of woman, has always been a doorway of evil.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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
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
What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
New York... that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb and said, "They all feed one another," and called it good.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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
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
There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.

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
To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries, 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
The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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
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
If only religion could be brought to take an interest in this earthly future, what a help it would be!... Think of the appeal to the less spiritual of us, to those who never did get enthusiastic about eternity, or care so tenderly about their own souls, yet who could rise to the thought of improving this world for the children they love, and their children after them.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman