Top 50 Gene Stratton-Porter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Tears were a blessing; they were a relief; they did wash the ache from the heart, ease brain strain, and encourage the soul.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

2. “If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

3. “I write as the birds sing, because I must, and usually from the same source of inspiration.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

4. “In the economy of nature nothing is ever lost. I cannot belive that the soul of man shall prove the one exception.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

5. “I don’t so much mind the falling, but I do seem to select the hardest spots to light on.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

6. “You cannot write on the heart of another what you do not feel yourself.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

7. “Of two evils, I always choose the lesser.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

8. “Nature can be trusted to work her own miracle in the heart of any man whose daily task keeps him alone among her sights, sounds and silences.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

9. “Money was their God; work their religion...”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

10. “Turn her loose out of doors; give her good books, and leave her alone. You won’t be disappointed in the woman who evolves.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

11. “The seasons run with swift feet.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

12. “It really seems as if failure and hardship make more of a human being of folks than success.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

13. “Nature always levies her tribute.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

14. “We are all more interested in ourselves than in any one else in this world, until love comes; then we soon learn to a love man more than life, and when a child comes we learn another love, so clear, so high, so purifying, that we become of no moment at all, and live only for those we love.” “You.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

15. “To me, it seems the only pleasure in this world worth having is the joy we derive from living for those we love, and those we can help.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

16. “Every intoxicating delight of early spring was in the air. The breeze that fanned her cheek was laden with subtle perfume and the crisp, fresh odor of unfolding leaves.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

17. “To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

18. “Do you know that being a stranger is the hardest thing that can happen to any one in all this world?”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

19. “If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose, among the only ones who live beyond the grave in this world, the people who write books that help, make exquisite music, carve statues, paint pictures, and work for others. Never mind the calico dress, and the coarse shoes.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

20. “When any man accumulates more than he can earn with his own hands, he begins to enrich himself at the expense of the youth, the sweat, the blood, the joy of his fellow men.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

21. “Of course you do, child,” said mother. “Families were made to cling together, and stand by each other in every circumstance of life – joy or sorrow. Of course you need your family.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

22. “The wages of sin are the hardest debts on earth to pay, and they are always collected at inconvenient times and unexpected places.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

23. “What was money that it should make such dreadful things of men and women?”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

24. “I loved words that filled your mouth, and sounded as if you were used to books.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

25. “They knew so well how it felt, that they kept one bed in the boys’ room, and any man who came at dusk got his supper, to sleep there, and his breakfast, and there never was anything to pay. The girls always scolded dreadfully about the extra washing, but mother said she slept on sheets when she came out, and some one washed them.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

26. “How a big majority of book critics and authors have come to believe and to teach that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, God knows...”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

27. “Freckles never tired of studying the devotion of a fox mother to her babies. To him, whose early life had been so embittered by continual proof of neglect and cruelty in human parents toward their children, the love of these furred and feathered folk of the Limberlost was even more of a miracle than to the Bird Woman and the Angel.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

28. “That spring I decided if school didn’t stop pretty soon, I’d run away again, and I didn’t in the least care what they did to me.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

29. “She is the best-dressed woman in the county, and the best looking,” said Mrs. Bates, “and that’s all there is to her.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

30. “I have to take care of this,” faltered Elnora, hurrying toward the door to hide the tears which were rolling down her cheeks. “I must help,” said Philip, disappearing also. “Elnora,” he called, catching up with her, “take me where.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

31. “I do not believe there is any one study that can be taken up that will broaden the imagination, that will be the source from which will spring more deep thinking and sincere research than the study of astronomy.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

32. “Being dead was one thing, getting ready for a wedding another.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

33. “She stood looking down a long time; finally she picked up a fine specimen of each of the roses and slowly dropped them on her father’s grave. “There! You may have that many,” she said. “You look a little too lonely, lying here beside the others with not a single one, but if you could speak, I wonder whether you would say, ‘Thank you!’ or ‘Take the damn weeds off me!‘” CHAPTER.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

34. “When she returned she handed her mother an oblong frame, hand carved, enclosing Elnora’s picture, taken by a schoolmate’s camera. She wore her storm-coat and carried a dripping umbrella. From under it looked her bright face; her books and lunchbox were on her arm, and across the bottom of the frame was carved, “Your Country Classmate.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

35. “I am so unfortunate in my temper. I could manage slaves better than women. This time I’ll be calm, and reason things out with her, or I’ll blow out my brains.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

36. “They all reproduce themselves, they all make something intended for music, they all express a feeling in their hearts by the exercise we call dance, they all believe in the after life of the soul. This belief is as much a PART of any man, ever born in any location, as his hands and his feet.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

37. “She must have slapped those chickens into the skillet before they knew their heads were off.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

38. “There is one great beauty in idealized romance: reading it can make no one worse than he is, while it may help thousands to a cleaner life and higher inspiration than they ever before have known.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

39. “The Angel’s eyes widened curiously and her lips parted. a deep colour swept into her cheeks. She had intended to arouse him. She had more than succeeded. She was too young to know that in the effort to rouse a man, women frequently kindle fires that they neither can quench or control.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

40. “What you have to give is taught in no college, and I am not sure but you would spoil yourself if you tried to run your mind through a set groove with hundreds of others.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

41. “She knew, even lacking as she was in feminine sophistication, that there were two open roads to the heart of a woman. One is a wedding and the other is a baby. The lure of either is irresistible. As.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

42. “Be sure that you are right; and then go ahead.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

43. “With some people it makes a regular battlefield of the human heart – this struggle for self-expression,” said Philip. “You are going to do beautiful work in the world, and do it well.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

44. “But he was thankful for the offer and dimly he was beginning to formulate in his mind the feeling that the world is made up of good people and bad people, of selfish people and thoughtful people, of cruel people and kind people, and it was merely a case of luck as to which kind you met when you went on a great adventure.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

45. “I was ignorant at first of bookish subjects, but in his atmosphere, if one were no student, and didn’t even try to keep up, or forge ahead, they would absorb much through association.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

46. “If the homemakers of this country don’t get the idea into their heads pretty soon that they are not going to be able to hold their own with the rest of the world, with no children, or one child in the family, there’s a sad day of reckoning coming.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

47. “You see it’s like this: the Book tells us most distinctly that ‘God is love.’ Now it was love that sent Laddie to bind himself for a long, tedious job, to give Leon his horse, wasn’t it?”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

48. “Appraise’ fits Eileen like her glove. She appraises every thing on a monetary basis, and when she can’t figure that it’s going to be worth an appreciable number of dollars and cents to her – ‘to the garage wid it,’ as Katy would say.” When.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

49. “The swamp had sent back the soul of her loved dead and put it into the body of the daughter she resented, and it was almost more than she could endure and live.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter

50. “I do not know why it is the fate of the world always to want something different from what life gives them.”

— Gene Stratton-Porter