Top 150 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is a verb, not a noun.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

4. “Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

6. “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.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

9. “I have preferred chloroform to cancer.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

10. “Concepts antedate facts.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

11. “So when the great word “Mother!” rang once more, I saw at last its meaning and its place; Not the blind passion of the brooding past, But Mother – the World’s Mother – come at last, To love as she had never loved before – To feed and guard and teach the human race.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

13. “It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

14. “It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

15. “A man’s honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

16. “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

17. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

18. “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

21. “Love grows by service.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

23. “Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

24. “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.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

25. “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

26. “Shall you complain who feed the world? Who clothe the world? Who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world, Of what the world may do? As from this hour You use your power, The world must follow you!”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

28. “The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

33. “Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, – to dress and entertain, and order things.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

35. “You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

36. “It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. “They all eat one another!” he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb and said, “They all feed one another,” and called it good.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

38. “Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way! I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already! Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able – to dress and entertain, and order things. It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Only women there – and children,” Jeff urged excitedly. “But they look – why, this is a CIVILIZED country!” I protested. “There must be men.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

49. “The front pattern DOES move – and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman