Margaret Deland Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

She talked continually — and talking almost always smothers thinking.

Margaret Deland
She had risen and was walking about the room, her fat, worn face sharpening with a sort of animal alertness into power and protection. The claws that hide in every maternal creature slipped out of the fur of good manners.

Margaret Deland
The fact is, the secret of happiness is the sense of proportion.

Margaret Deland
If Paul... had tar on the seat of his breeches, and sat down in a bushel of doubloons, not one of 'em would stick to him!

Margaret Deland
A great moment raises most of the people who experience it, to its own level; and that is why they do not always recognize its greatness — or their own.

Margaret Deland
There are few things that are more endearing than the grace of listening with attention; indeed, it is more than endearing, it is impressive — for no one knows what wisdom lies concealed in silence!

Margaret Deland
It is curious how fatal it is, either to a situation or to an individual, or even to a name, if in an evil moment it becomes funny.

Margaret Deland
Age, per se, may claim tenderness and pity, but not respect; that only comes when the years have brought humanity and wisdom and the experience that worketh hope.

Margaret Deland
There was hardly a wrinkle on her placid face. Dr. Lavendar had been heard to say, in this connection, that 'thought made wrinkles.' And the inference was obvious.

Margaret Deland
As everybody knows, truthfulness and agreeable manners are often divorced on the ground of incompatibility.

Margaret Deland
That leap up of the sun is as glad as a child's laugh; it is as a renewal of the world's youth.

Margaret Deland
If a man really and truly believed that black was white, you might advise him to see an oculist, but you mustn't call him a liar.

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

Margaret Deland
Truth is like heat or light; its vibrations are endless, and are endlessly felt.

Margaret Deland
He tried, poor fellow, to assume his grand manner, but all in vain; he was like a drenched and dripping rooster, trying to crow in the rain.

Margaret Deland
She knows as much about babies as a wild cat knows about tatting.

Margaret Deland
He was of that pleasant temperament which believes whatever it is comfortable to believe; he was always able to explain facts to suit his mental necessities.

Margaret Deland
A manufactured interest has no staying quality — especially if it involves any hard work.

Margaret Deland
I have no faith in a human critter who hasn't one or two bad habits.

Margaret Deland
In a wicked way, it is an incentive to good living to observe the spice of enjoyment there is to a godly soul in a very little sin.

Margaret Deland
Arguing with Lucy was like trying to sew with no knot in your thread.

Margaret Deland
[The remark] shocked poor Ellen into the realization that when children go wrong, everybody (except their parents) knows that it is their parents' fault.

Margaret Deland
Dr. Lavendar had reached that degree of wisdom which knows that successful interference in love affairs must come from the inside, not from the outside.

Margaret Deland
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.

Margaret Deland
It's better to be crazy on one point and happy, than sane on all points and unhappy.

Margaret Deland
There is a bond, it appears, between mother and child which endures as long as they do. It is independent of love; reason cannot weaken it; hate cannot destroy it.

Margaret Deland
There isn't any virtue where there has never been any temptation. Virtue is just temptation, overcome.

Margaret Deland
Fighting should be left to dogs and cats and chickens, who can't reason.

Margaret Deland
There couldn't be war, unless lies were believed. War has to be nourished by lies.

Margaret Deland
Faith, it seems to me, is not the holding of certain dogmas; it is simply openness and readiness of heart to believe any truth which God may show.

Margaret Deland