Top 150 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The difference is great between one’s outside “life,” the things which happen to one, incidents, pains and pleasures, and one’s “living.””

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

103. “We thought of them as “Women,” and therefore timid; but it was two thousand years since they had had anything to be afraid of, and certainly more than one thousand since they had outgrown the feeling.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

104. “Maleness means war.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

105. “It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

106. “There’s heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty – for growth.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

108. “In exact proportion as women grow independent, educated, wise and free, do they become less submissive to men-made fashions.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

109. “A concept is stronger than a fact.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

110. “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.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

111. “A man hits me – I hit the man a little harder – then he won’t do it again.′ Unfortunately he did do it again – a little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious cities to the ground.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

113. “If a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and inexperienced; who in the second place is educated with a background of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest worthy of the name – why, it is a comparatively easy manner to sweep her off her feet with a dashing attack.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

114. “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

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

116. “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

117. “I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

118. “Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

119. “This led me very promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity – developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

121. “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

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

124. “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

125. “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

126. “Grateful return for happiness conferred is not the method of exchange in a partnership. The comfort a man takes with his wife is not in the nature of a business partnership, nor are her frugality and industry.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

127. “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.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

129. “Crime does not decrease in proportion to the severest punishment.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

131. “She is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has accumulated through the centuries; she is opposed from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of anything real.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

132. “It is the old masculine spirit of government as authority which is so slow in adapting itself to the democratic idea of government as service. That it should be a representative government they grasp, but representative of what? of the common will, they say; the will of the majority; – never thinking that it is the common good, the common welfare, that government should represent.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

133. “However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

134. “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

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

137. “I see that I have not remarked that these women had pockets in surprising number and variety. They were in all their garments, and the middle one in particular was shingled with them.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

138. “Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found – the female capering and prancing before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

141. “Our laws as we support them now are slow, wasteful, cumbrous systems, which require a special caste to interpret and another to enforce; wherein the average citizen knows nothing of the law, and cares only to evade it when he can, obey it when he must.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

142. “Democracy calls for the understanding, recognition, and universal practise of social laws, – laws which are “natural,” like those of physics and chemistry; but your religion – and your education, too – taught Authority – not real law.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

143. “You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

144. “I don’t like to look out of the windows even – there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper, as I did?”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

145. “The world’s last prison will be simply a hospital for moral incurables.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

146. “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

147. “I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way – it is such a relief.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

148. “Why not? Why not be your own man for once in your life – do what you want to – not what other people want you to?”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

149. “The force of inertia acts in the domain of psychics as well as physics; any idea pushed into the popular mind with considerable force will keep on going until some opposing force – or the slow resistance of friction – stops it at last.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

150. “You see he does not believe I am sick!”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman