Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

I do not cough for my own amusement.

A cough is something that you yourself cant help, but everybody else does on purpose just to torment you.

We often disguise our reflexes as deliberate actions.

Habit is a second nature, and what was at first pleasure, is next necessity.

Okay, okay, okay. I understood that pushing the elevator button over and over again would not make the elevator appear sooner. But I couldn't help myself

Our prime purpose in life is to serve others.

Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.

You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.

Education should be the process of helping everyone to discover his uniqueness, to teach him how to develop that uniqueness, and then to show him how to share it because that’s the only reason for having anything.

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.

The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.

When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.

I pulled in a soft breath. My lungs were starving, crying out for air. I lay still, and a cough tickled at the back of my throat. It always happens when you're hiding, a cough, a sneeze, something. It's stupid. The body decides to screw around with you, even though it knows being quiet is the only way it's going to go on living.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide

I feel like it's almost my purpose to speak up about my experience so it could help somebody else.

Worrying about dying will hardly help you live.

Service is a limitless opportunity, it is the reason why we breathe.

I'm one of the people that when I wake up I have to do what I do. It's not like I want to do it. I kind of have to do it.

We ought to love temperance for itself, and in obedience to God who has commanded it and chastity; but what I am forced to by catarrhs, or owe to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance.

You can't help someone unless she wants to help herself. You can give her a nudge, but if she doesn't want to help herself, no one is going to be able to force her to do anything. I like that "attraction rather than promotion" approach.

INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.