Margaret Deland Quotes - Page 3

It is useless to deny that, unless one has a genius for imparting knowledge, teaching is a drudgery.

... is there anything more unjust than to build gold and brass and iron on poor, well-meaning clay, -- and then blame the clay when the whole image falls into dust?

What I object to in Mother is that she wants me to think her thoughts. Apart from the question of hypocrisy, I prefer my own.

Absurdity is the one thing love can't stand; it can overlook anything else, -- coldness, or weakness, or viciousness, -- but just be ridiculous and that's the end of it!

... when personal happiness conflicts with any great human ideal, the right to claim such happiness is as nothing compared to the privilege of resigning it.

In connection with death, or birth, or love, modesty is only a rather puerile self-consciousness.

I notice that when people have no sense of responsibility, you call them either criminals or geniuses.

By some mysterious method, Susan Carr's gossip gave the listener a gentler feeling towards his kind. When she spoke of her neighbors' faults, one knew that somehow they were simply virtues gone to seed.

the attempt to break a habit of years is necessarily experimental.

Nature is perfectly impartial. Brain has no sex!

a manufactured interest has no staying quality - especially if it involves any hard work.

Lawyers make their cake by cooking up other people's troubles.

When it comes to bombshells, there are few that can be more effective than that small, flat, frail thing, a letter.

Some time in our lives every man and woman of us, putting out our hands toward the stars, touch on either side our prison walls the immutable limitations of temperament

There isn't any virtue where there has never been any temptation.

moral vanity is the snare of good people.

Grief is the price Love pays for being in the same world with Death.

Age, with shamefaced relief, has learned the solvent quality of Time. It is this quality which makes possible the contemplation of certain embarrassing heavenly reunions.

There's one thing that always interests me about you good people, not your certainty that the rest of us are swine, - no doubt we are, - but your certainty that your opinions are pearls.

Books are like sapphires; they must be polished - polished! or else you insult your readers.

To talk over a quarrel, with its inevitable accompaniment of self-justification, is too much like handling cobwebs to be very successful.

the blue and cloudless day closes like the lid of a casket of jewels upon the violet rim of sea, and shuts out the light.

... there must be reserves -- except with God. The human soul is solitary. But for confession that is different; justice and reparation sometimes demand it; but, again, justice and courage sometimes forbid it.

When two duties jostle each other, one of 'em isn't a duty.

silence is very moving to youth, for who knows what it hides?