The one predominant duty is to find one’s work and do it.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Duty, Welfare
To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must needs do something.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Inaction, Procrastination, Getting Going, Happiness, Action
A concept is stronger than a fact.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Facts
To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature; to make beautiful things has more.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Beauty
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
Topics: Housework
The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Mothers
The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Change, Consistency
However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: One liners, Illusion
But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Reason
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.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Work
Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Suicide
Eternity is not something that begins after you’re dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Live-now, Eternity
It is the duty of youth to bring its fresh 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 lift the world forward. That is what they are for.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Fresh
The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women
One and all, religions have their original prophets, their sacred books, their traditions of ages gone. One and all require us to accept without question what other people long dead have said or written; to obey without question the commands of those behind us…. 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
Topics: Religion
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot American Sociologist
- Charles Cooley American Sociologist
- Rita Mae Brown American Writer, Feminist
- Audre Lorde American Poet, Feminist
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Gertrude Stein American Writer
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- Harriet Martineau English Sociologist
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