Margaret Oliphant Quotes

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

#4. 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 ...

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

#8. There's looks as speaks as strong as words ...

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

#11. 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.

Margaret Oliphant

#12. 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 ...

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

#14. 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.

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

#17. There is nothing so costly as bargains.

Margaret Oliphant

#18. 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.

Margaret Oliphant

#19. All perfection is melancholy.

Margaret Oliphant

#20. The eye is deceitful as well as the heart.

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

#23. 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.

Margaret Oliphant

#24. 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.

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

#32. 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.

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

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

Margaret Oliphant

#35. Imagination is the first faculty wanting in those that do harm to their kind ...

Margaret Oliphant

#36. 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.

Margaret Oliphant