Margaret Oliphant Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is nothing so costly as bargains.

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

All perfection is melancholy.

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

... 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.