Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Her heart is older than her head; yea, her emotion is the mother of her reason

Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.

Man is a recording animal.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.

Any 6 year old’s hindsight is better than a President’s foresight.

You can be taught so much, but the sense of anticipation cannot be taught.

We have to learn from the past.

Basically, I'm an emotional man and a human being.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

There's something about being around a long time that puts stuff in perspective.

As humans, we are not so rationalist as we think we are. I think our biggest quality is indeed that we are human, truly human: if our biggest quality would be rationality, we would lose our soul.

It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory.

Eragon cried out, and in his desperation he reached for Saphira and the Eldunarí... and without meaning to, he drew from their stories of energy. And with that energy he cast a spell. It was a spell without words... His was a spell of instinct and emotion; language could not contain it.

After all, I quite naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living, and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn (and it may never learn anything else; that isn't very reassuring, but why not admit it?), while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it's nevertheless alive.

Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.

In political matters feeling often decides more correctly than reason.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.

The heart is the best logician.

Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.

Passion often renders the most clever man a fool, and sometimes renders the most foolish man clever.

Music doesn't hurt anybody, that's what's amazing. Everything is in there, every kind of human emotion, from the darkest to the lightest. And it has power. Unbelievable power.

Instinct is a great matter. I was now a coward on instinct.