Best 42 quotes of Dorothy Canfield Fisher on MyQuotes

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    don't let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you know that - and it's true.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Everyone bowed to that unwritten law of family life which ordains that, in the long run, everyone submerges his personal preference in the effort to conform to that of the member of the circle who complains most loudly and is most difficult to satisfy.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    gossip ... is only fiction produced by non-professionals.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    help that is not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing organism.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    If we could learn how to utilize all the intelligence and patent good will children are born with, instead of ignoring much of it - why - there might be enough to go around! There might be enough to solve our alarming human problems, to put an end to poverty, to stop waging wars.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    I'm as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    I never heard of anybody who admired the character of sheep. Even the gentlest human personalities in contact with them are annoyed by their lack of brains, courage and initiative, by their extraordinary ability to get themselves into uncomfortable or dangerous situations and then wait in inert helplessness for someone to rescue them.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    it was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    I've always noticed that nobody can be single-minded who isn't narrow-minded; and I think it likely that people who aren't so cocksure what they want to do with themselves, hesitate because they have a great deal more to deal with. A nature rich in fine and complex possibilities takes more time to dispose of itself, but when it does, the world's beauty is the gainer.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Libraries are the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Never since the dawn of human history, as far as I can find out, did people long settled in any region give a friendly welcome to newcomers. One of the disagreeable traits of our human nature seems to be to dislike on sight people who come later than the first settlers.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Oh, yes, of course I like music, too. Very much. It's so pleasant of an evening, especially when made by your friends at home. I often say I like it better than cards. Though I must say I do like a good game of bridge.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    one reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    On New Year's Day every calendar, large and small, has the same number of dates. But we soon learn that the years are of very different lengths.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip?

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Taking somebody's sacrifices is like taking counterfeit money. You're only the poorer.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    the most elementary experience of life proves that the effects of compulsion last exactly as long as the physical or moral club can be applied.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    ...there are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    There's no healthy life possible without some sensual feeling between the husband and wife, but there's nothing in the world more awful than married life when it's the only common ground.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    there's no such thing as luck. Nothing ever just happens to anybody. ... nothing can really happen to a person till he lets it happen.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    The richness and endless variety of human relationships ... that's what authors, even the finest and greatest, only succeed in hinting at. It's a hopeless business, like trying to dip up the ocean with a tea-spoon.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened majority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the character of the teacher.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    Vermont tradition is based on the idea that group life should leave each person as free as possible to arrange his own life. This freedom is the only climate in which (we feel) a human being may create his own happiness. ... Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    What is life, but one long risk?

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    What's the use of inventing a better system as long as there just aren't enough folks with sense to go around?

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    You can't wish a body any worse luck than to get what he wants.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    You think religion is what's inside a little building filled with pretty lights from stained glass windows. But it's not. It's wings! Wings!

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    The minute your group gets so big you don't know anybody in it and they don't know you, there's hell to pay.

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    This time Elizabeth Ann didn't answer, because she herself didn't know what the matter was. But I do, and I'll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up. Of course, she didn't really know that till she did come to be grown up, but she had her first dim notion of it in that moment, and it made her feel the way you do when you're learning to skate and somebody pulls away the chair you've been leaning on and says, "Now, go it alone!

  • By Anonym
    Dorothy Canfield Fisher

    What's the matter?" asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face. "Why—why," said Elizabeth Ann, "I don't know what I am at all. If I'm second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?" The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. "you aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in! And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table?