Dorothy Canfield Fisher Quotes

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

It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

...there are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel.

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

Libraries are the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.

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

Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.

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.

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

No Vermont town ever let anybody in it starve.

What is life, but one long risk?

Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.

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

help that is not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing organism.

there's no such thing as luck. Nothing ever just happens to anybody. ... nothing can really happen to a person till he lets it happen.

You can't wish a body any worse luck than to get what he wants.

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.

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.

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

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.

The richness and endless variety of human relationships ... that's what authors, even the finest and greatest, only succeed in hinting at. It's a hopeless business, like trying to dip up the ocean with a tea-spoon.

it was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.