MARGARET OLIPHANT

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

... 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.

All perfection is melancholy.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

There's looks as speaks as strong as words.

Truly there is nothing in the world so blessed or so sweet as the heritage of children.

There is nothing so costly as bargains.

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.

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

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

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