Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Until mothers earn their livings, women will not

I have preferred chloroform to cancer

Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

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!

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

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