Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes - Page 4

To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America ... 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.

It is not for nothing that a man's best friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

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.

Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.

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.

At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.

Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

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

The fact that women in the home have shut themselves away from the thought and life of the world has done much to retard progress.We fill the world with the children of 20th century A.D. fathers and 20th century B.C. mothers.

Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.

Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work.

We have built into the constitution of the human race the habit and desire of taking, as divorced from its natural precursor and concomitant of making.

The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gaveus relgions which coule not possible maintained without belief and obedience: ... we find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to swquare their beliefs with the laws of life.

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

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.

I do not want to be a fly,I want to be a worm!

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

There should be an end to the bitterness of feeling which has arisen between the sexes in this century.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.

While we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.

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

The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them-on the race. You see, we are MOTHERS, she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.

In great cities where people of ability abound, there is always a feverish urge to keep ahead, to set the pace, to adopt each new fashion in thought and theory as well as in dress - or undress.

The home is the centre and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.