Dorothy Canfield Fisher Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

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
A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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
What better can any of us do than to reach for our own stars... and know which they are?

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
I've always noticed that nobody can be single-minded who isn't narrow-minded; and I think it likely that people who aren't so cocksure what they want to do with themselves, hesitate because they have a great deal more to deal with. A nature rich in fine and complex possibilities takes more time to dispose of itself, but when it does, the world's beauty is the gainer.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
The encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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
Like other potentates with a long habit of arbitrary authority, she covered her perplexity with a smart show of decision.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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
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
I never heard of anybody who admired the character of sheep. Even the gentlest human personalities in contact with them are annoyed by their lack of brains, courage and initiative, by their extraordinary ability to get themselves into uncomfortable or dangerous situations and then wait in inert helplessness for someone to rescue them.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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
You are dipped up from the great river of consciousness, and death only pours you back.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, continuing steadily to talk (on the theory that talking prevents too great concentration of thought), and making the round of all the possible things to say.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Taking somebody's sacrifices is like taking counterfeit money. You're only the poorer.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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
We don't decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else. If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of serious reflection to what they want to get out of life that they give to the question of what they want to get out of a two-weeks' vacation [...] there aren't many folks who wouldn't be horrified at the aimless procession of their busy days and the trivial false standards they subscribe to with their blood and sweat.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
One reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
He was impelled, by the fatality that hangs over people who have struck a false note, to strike it yet more loudly.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened majority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the character of the teacher.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
I'm as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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
What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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
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
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
The classroom in the modern city child's life is the only equivalent for what used to be 'his community.'

Dorothy Canfield Fisher