Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

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

Life is a verb, not a noun.

And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.

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

The labor 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.

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.

In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.

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

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

We grovel and "worship" and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose.

I have preferred chloroform to cancer

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

To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for human development - the full use of one's best faculties - this is the health and happiness for both man and woman.

It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.

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

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

In our steady insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that they were allowed to men and forbidden to women.

The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent.

Love grows by service.

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.

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.

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

We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.

A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.

The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.