Margaret Deland Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

Conscience that isn't hitched up to common sense is a mighty dangerous thing.

Margaret Deland
Self-sacrifice which denies common sense isn't virtue; it's spiritual dissipation!

Margaret Deland
One must desire something, to be alive: perhaps absolute satisfaction is only another name for Death.

Margaret Deland
A pint can't hold a quart. If it holds a pint, it is doing all that can be expected of it.

Margaret Deland
There is no embarrassment quite like the embarrassment of listening to a person for whom one has a regard making a fool of himself.

Margaret Deland
She felt, as mothers have been apt to feel since sons began to choose wives — that her son's choice was a repudiation of the influences which had surrounded him ever since he was born!

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

Margaret Deland
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.

Margaret Deland
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.

Margaret Deland
As I get older there is nothing more constantly astonishing to me than the goodness of the Bad; — unless it is the badness of the Good.

Margaret Deland
Men love their wives not because of their virtues, but in spite of them.

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

Margaret Deland
His truthfulness, which ignored the courteous deceits of social life, was a kind of impropriety.

Margaret Deland
She empties her soul of its emotions just as a boy pulls his pocket wrong side out to show you that there's nothing in it.

Margaret Deland
We've all of us got to meet the devil alone. Temptation is a lonely business.

Margaret Deland
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.

Margaret Deland
When one promise jostles another, one of 'em isn't a promise.

Margaret Deland
A mother, she's always got love enough to go round, somehow. I wish you could say the same of shoes.

Margaret Deland
You see so much of the sin of human nature that you get to thinking human nature has got to sin. You are mistaken, sir; it has got to be decent.

Margaret Deland
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.

Margaret Deland
Gossip, after it reaches a certain point of insult and falsehood, becomes a source of amusement to its victims.

Margaret Deland
I have heard that a man might be his own lawyer, but you can't be your own judge.

Margaret Deland
The profession of the ministry is like matrimony: if it is possible for you to keep out of it, it's a sign that you've no business to go into it!

Margaret Deland
He had been up until three with an old woman who thought she was sick, and he had been routed out of bed again at five because she told her family that she was going to die. William King was not given to sarcasm, but he longed to say to the waiting relatives, 'There is no hope! — she'll live.'

Margaret Deland
A short cut to matrimonial unhappiness is not to have the same taste in jokes!

Margaret Deland
A sneer is like a flame; it may occasionally be curative because it cauterizes, but it leaves a bitter scar.

Margaret Deland
The anger of slow, mild, loving people has a lasting quality that mere bad-tempered folk cannot understand.

Margaret Deland
Grandmother belongs to the generation of women who were satisfied to have men retain their vices, if they removed their hats.

Margaret Deland
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?

Margaret Deland
The attempt to break a habit of years is necessarily experimental.

Margaret Deland