Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I was climbing up a mountain-path
With many things to do,
Important business of my own,
And other people's too,
When I ran against a Prejudice
That quite cut off the view.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The acts and facts of today continually diverge from the concepts of yesterday.

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

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
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
The mother- poor invaded soul- finds even the bathroom door no bar to hammering little hands.

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman