Top 50 Gertrude Atherton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.”

— Gertrude Atherton

2. “Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.”

— Gertrude Atherton

3. “Every leader of a great revolution is a fanatic and a Jesuit.”

— Gertrude Atherton

4. “Self-admiration giveth much consolation.”

— Gertrude Atherton

5. “The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.”

— Gertrude Atherton

6. “Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!”

— Gertrude Atherton

7. “Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.”

— Gertrude Atherton

8. “The final result of too much routine is death in life.”

— Gertrude Atherton

9. “No loose fish enters our quiet bay.”

— Gertrude Atherton

10. “The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.”

— Gertrude Atherton

11. “I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don’t care a hang for the ‘verbal felicities.’ They’ll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.”

— Gertrude Atherton

12. “A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?”

— Gertrude Atherton

13. “In times of panic man seems to exchange his soul for a tail.”

— Gertrude Atherton

14. “All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.”

— Gertrude Atherton

15. “Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.”

— Gertrude Atherton

16. “Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent.”

— Gertrude Atherton

17. “It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the ‘ancestral piles’ of England.”

— Gertrude Atherton

18. “Oh, what is young love! The urge of the race. A blaze that ends in babies or ashes.”

— Gertrude Atherton

19. “The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.”

— Gertrude Atherton

20. “It took me some time to learn that although every one secretly cherishes the ambition to be ‘put in a book,’ no one is ever satisfied with anything save incense, butter, and honey, unrelieved by salt or spice.”

— Gertrude Atherton

21. “No matter how hard a man may labor, some woman is always in the background of his mind. She is the one reward of virtue.”

— Gertrude Atherton

22. “It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.”

— Gertrude Atherton

23. “Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.”

— Gertrude Atherton

24. “Has it ever occurred to you, that the rich are at the mercy of the poor, not the poor at that of the rich? Who permits us to be rich if not the poor?”

— Gertrude Atherton

25. “I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.”

— Gertrude Atherton

26. “The French are a race of individuals. There is no type.”

— Gertrude Atherton

27. “I have come to the conclusion that the modern interpretation of the Declaration of Independence is something like this: I am as good as those that think themselves better and a long sight better than those who only think themselves as good.”

— Gertrude Atherton

28. “It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.”

— Gertrude Atherton

29. “The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.”

— Gertrude Atherton

30. “Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.”

— Gertrude Atherton

31. “There is nothing so carking as the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity.”

— Gertrude Atherton

32. “Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning, secret or avowed, to the occult. The creative gift is in very close relationship with the Great Force behind the universe; for aught we know, may be an atom thereof. It is not strange, therefore, that the lesser and closer of the unseen forces should send their vibrations to it occasionally; or, at all events, that the imagination should incline its ear to the most mysterious and picturesque of all beliefs.”

— Gertrude Atherton

33. “The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.”

— Gertrude Atherton

34. “Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.”

— Gertrude Atherton

35. “Better extirpate the whole breed, root and branch. And this, unless the German people come to their senses, is what we propose to do.”

— Gertrude Atherton

36. “Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.”

— Gertrude Atherton

37. “A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains...”

— Gertrude Atherton

38. “To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.”

— Gertrude Atherton

39. “A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one’s bag of precautions.”

— Gertrude Atherton

40. “Success is a great healer.”

— Gertrude Atherton

41. “Fame compensates for a column of wants.”

— Gertrude Atherton

42. “No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class...”

— Gertrude Atherton

43. “Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.”

— Gertrude Atherton

44. “Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so.”

— Gertrude Atherton

45. “The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.”

— Gertrude Atherton

46. “California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices...”

— Gertrude Atherton

47. “I see no present solution of a great and intricate problem but that the rich should realize their duty to the poor.”

— Gertrude Atherton

48. “New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.”

— Gertrude Atherton

49. “Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.”

— Gertrude Atherton

50. “If you can’t get the very best in this world, take nothing.”

— Gertrude Atherton