Margaret Oliphant Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Oliphant
Life, though it is short, is very long, and contains so much. And one does not, to one's consciousness, change as one's outward appearance and capabilities do. Doesn't Mrs. Somerville say that, so far from feeling old, she was not always quite certain (up in the seventies) whether she was quite grown up!

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

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

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

Margaret Oliphant
The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to!. It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

Margaret Oliphant
There's looks as speaks as strong as words...

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

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

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

Margaret Oliphant
What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?

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

Margaret Oliphant
I scarcely remember any writer who has ever ventured to say that the half of the work of the world is actually accomplished by women; and very few husbands who would be otherwise than greatly startled and amazed, if not indignant, if not derisive, at the suggestion of such an idea as that the work of their wives was equal to their own.

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

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

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

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

Margaret Oliphant