Charlotte Perkins Gilman quotes

Life is a verb, not a noun.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Love #Verbs #Nouns

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Years #Atheism #Done

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Horse #Men #House

Love grows by service.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Love #Love Grows #Grows

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Home #Two #Soul

It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should life the world forward. That is what they are for.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Peace #Tired #Army

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

#Peace #Mind #Weakness

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

#Death #Peace #Eternity

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Mother #Race #Friendly

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

#Iron #Brain #Substance

Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Evil #Memorial #Essentials

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

#Light #Feelings #Matter

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

#Daylight #Creeps

The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Wisdom #Duty

We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping 'the God of our fathers.' Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way?
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Change #Children #Father

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Taken #California #Bed

I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Children #Wall #Lying

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Fashion #Cities #People

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

#Damage #Claims #Should

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Civilization #Agony #Abhorrent

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Believe #Healthy #Brain

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

#Unity #Together #Tables

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

#Thinking #Nervous #Sensitive

This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place . . . and the world waits while she powders her nose.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Mother #Waiting #Noses

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

#Wings #Hot #Burning

I do not want to be a fly,I want to be a worm!
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Want #Worms

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Blood #America #Doe

The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Atheism #Gone #Movement

If we once admit that our life is here for the purpose of race-improvement, then we question any religion which does not improve the race, or the main force of which evaporates, as it were, directing our best efforts toward the sky.... Improvement in the human race is not accomplished by extracting any number of souls and placing them in heaven, or elsewhere. It must be established on earth, either through achievement in social service, or through better children.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Children #Numbers #Race

Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants?
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Men #Forever #Atheism

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

#Mother #Mistake #Men

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

#Religious #Atheism #World

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

#Mind #Atheism

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

#Believe #Thinking #Atheism

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

#Mean #People #Heaven

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Social #Accepting #Process

In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. ... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Block #Lying #Average

If only religion could be brought to take an interest in this earthly future, what a help it would be! ... Think of the appeal to the less spiritual of us, to those who never did get enthusiastic about eternity, or care so tenderly about their own souls, yet who could rise to the thought of improving this world for the children they love, and their children after them.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Spiritual #Children #Thinking

No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, 'This is our best thought, go on, think farther!' then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Believe #Thinking #Errors

What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Done

Not woman, but the condition of woman, has always been a doorway of evil.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Evil #Doorways

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Sex #Simple #Men

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

#Heart #Purses #Speak

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

#Sex #Feelings #Bitterness

If fifty men did all the work, / And gave the price to five, / And let those five make all the rules - / You'd say the fifty men were fools, / Unfit to be alive.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Work #Men #Alive

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Work #Men #Use

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

#Men #Underwear #Obsessed

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

#Mother #Children #Father

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

#Children #Ethics #Morality

[Warfare is] maleness in its absurdest extremes. Here is to be studied the whole gamut of basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of glorious ostentation, with the loudest accompaniment of noise.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Men #Warfare #Noise

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Religious #Sea #Law

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Facts #Familiar #Hardest

It cannot be too strongly asserted that the insistence on blind, unreasoning faith is due mainly to the maintenance of a subject-matter upon which there was no knowledge, namely the 'other world'; and that this basis was assumed because of early man's preoccupation with death. It is, unfortunately, quite possible to believe a thing which is contradicted by facts, especially if the facts are not generally known; but if the whole position on which we rested our religions had been visibly opposed by what we did know, even the unthinking masses would, in time, have noticed it.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Faith #Believe #Men

all social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Believe #Men #Perception

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

#Home #Men #Order

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

#Home #Men #Absence

The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire - and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period - has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Home #Mean #Fire

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Home #Improvement #Institutions

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Ideas #Feelings #Mind

Concepts antedate facts.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Ideas #Facts

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Names #Nuisance #Firsts

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.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Art #Men #House

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#Cups #Illusion