Gertrude Atherton Quotes
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To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.
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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.
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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.
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Power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.
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Better extirpate the whole breed, root and branch. And this, unless the German people come to their senses, is what we propose to do.
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... books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive.
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Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent.
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Alexander Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
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The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.
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The world, and the great and free United States in particular, is full of narrow-minded, ignorant, moronic, bigoted, cowardly, self-righteous, anemic, pig-headed, stupid, puritanical, hypocritical, prejudiced, fanatical, cocoa-blooded atavists, who soothe their inferiority complex by barking their hatred of anything new.
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Orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.
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... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.
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Did any great genius ever enter the world in the wake of commonplace pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy.
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New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.
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A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.
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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.
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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.
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Her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.
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No loose fish enters our quiet bay.
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The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.
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Genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.
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The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.
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The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.
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Self-admiration giveth much consolation.