Dorothy Canfield Fisher Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Father sticks to it that anything that promises to pay too much can't help being risky.

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.

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

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.

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.

What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.

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

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

A mom isn't an individual to lean on, but a person to generate leaning needless.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

...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.

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

No Vermont town ever let anybody in it starve.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

What is life, but one long risk?

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

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

Almost anything is enough to keep alive someone who wishes nothing for himself but time to write music.

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!

What better can any of us do than to reach for our own stars ... and know which they are?

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.

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?

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

the encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.