Margaret Oliphant Quotations

What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?

To have a man who can flirt is next thing to indispensable to a leader of society.

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.

As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.

Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought.

For everybody knows that it requires very little to satisfy the gentlemen, if a woman will only give her mind to it.

Spring cold is like the poverty of a poor man who has had a fortune left him - better days are coming ...

It is so seldom in this world that things come just when they are wanted ...

A hotel is a hotel all the world over, a place essentially vulgar, commonplace, venal, the travesty of a human home.

Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.

I have my own way of dividing people, as I suppose most of us have. There are those whom I can talk to, and those whom I can't.

... I have always been a disappointment to my friends. I have no gift of talk, not much to say; and though I have always been an excellent listener, that only succeeds under auspicious circumstances.

Many love me, but by none am I enough beloved.

there are some people who never learn; indeed, few people learn by experience, so far as I have ever seen.

there's looks as speaks as strong as words ...

I scarcely remember any writer who has ever ventured to say that the half of the work of the world is actually accomplished by women; and very few husbands who would be otherwise than greatly startled and amazed, if not indignant, if not derisive, at the suggestion of such an idea as that the work of their wives was equal to their own.

imagination is the first faculty wanting in those that do harm to their kind ...

All perfection is melancholy.

It is often easier to justify one's self to others than to respond to the secret doubts that arise in one's own bosom.

Truly there is nothing in the world so blessed or so sweet as the heritage of children.

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! . It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

The middle of life is the testing-ground of character and strength.

Against the long years when family bonds make up all that is happiest in life, there must always be reckoned those moments of agitation and revolution, during which the bosom of a family is the most unrestful and disturbing place in existence ...

every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that which comes after it.

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.

I think reading a novel is almost next best to having something to do.

There is nothing so costly as bargains.

Next to happiness, perhaps enmity is the most healthful stimulant of the human mind.

Married people do stand up so for each other when you say a word, however they may fight between themselves.

Terror of being found out is not always a preservative, it sometimes hurries on the act which it ought to prevent ...

Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others.

Good works may only be beautiful sins, if they are not done in a true spirit ...

laughing is not the first expression of joy. ... A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears ...

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

The ideal is the flower-garden of the mind, and very apt to run to weeds unless carefully tended.

one only says it is one's duty when one has something disagreeable to do ...

... up to this date, I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I have attained to, is the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.