Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.

It does not do to trust people too much.

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

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

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

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards.

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

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

Said I, in scorn all burning hot,In rage and anger high,You ignominious idiot,Those wings are made to fly!

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

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

the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed

There are the two of you - the two sexes- to love and help one another. It must be a rich and wonderful world

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.

But only this-that people who are utterly ignorant will believe anything-which you certainly knew before.

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

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind

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

But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

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.

But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

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

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

A family unity which is only bound together with a table-cloth is of questionable value.

The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.

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

To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.

For men obsessed with women's underwear, a course in washing, ironing and mending is recommended.

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things

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

It would have saved trouble had I remained Perkins from the first, this changing of women's names is a nuisance we are now happily outgrowing.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

He says no one can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.

They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.

Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.

Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society
more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

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

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

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

The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

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

A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world.

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

If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages
not alimony.

Love grows by service.

The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.

John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious!

The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.

I always liked that Arab saying, 'First tie your camel and then trust in the Lord,

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

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

The difference is great between one's outside "life," the things which happen to one, incidents, pains and pleasures, and one's "living."

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

I ran against a Prejudice that quite cut off the view.

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.

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

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

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

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.

When we use our past merely as a guide-book, and concentrate our noble emotions on the present and future, we shall improve more rapidly.

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

I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.

I have preferred chloroform to cancer

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

I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Life is a verb, not a noun.

It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.

Those who too patiently serve as props sometimes underrate the possibilities of the vine.

A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband.

[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American

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

Until mothers earn their livings, women will not

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

I was madly in love with not so much what was there as with what I supposed to be there.

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

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

Woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body

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.

Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.

The front pattern DOES move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

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