Margaret Oliphant Quotes

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 ...

The eye is deceitful as well as the heart.

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

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.

There is nothing so costly as bargains.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

All perfection is melancholy.

Many love me, but by none am I enough beloved.

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

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

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

I have always been a disappointment to my friends. I have no gift of talk, not much to say; and though I have always been an excellent listener, that only succeeds under auspicious circumstances.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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