Top 381 Quotes & Sayings by Mignon McLaughlin - Page 4

If you're a gifted flirt, talking about the price of eggs will do as well as any other subject.

As we grow older, our capacity for enjoyment shrinks, but not our appetite for it.

Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.

No one ever loved anyone the way that person wanted to be loved.

When hope is hungry, everything feeds it

Anything you lose automatically doubles in value.

Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom.

Those who are brutally honest are seldom so with themselves.

The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.

Learn a little of anything, and you're ready to proselytize.

If an article is attractive, or useful, or inexpensive, they'll stop making it tomorrow; if it's all three, they stopped making it yesterday.

Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart.

Surrounded by people who love life, you love it too; surrounded by people who don't, you don't.

We come late, if at all, to wine and philosophy: whiskey and action are easier.

What we forgive too freely doesn't stay forgiven.

The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol.

There's something in every atheist, itching to believe, and something in every believer, itching to doubt.

Neurotics are anxiety prone, accident prone, and often just prone.

We welcome passion, for the mind is briefly let off duty.

If you jot down every silly thought that pops into your mind, you will soon find out everything you most seriously believe.

Life marks us all down, so it's just as well that we start out by overpricing ourselves.

I wish I'd said it first, and I don't even know who did: The only problems that money can solve are money problems.

Minor vices lead to major ones, but minor virtues stay put.

Neurotics are always looking for something new to overdo.

Don't fool yourself that important things can be put off till tomorrow; they can be put off forever, or not at all

We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.

Despair is anger with no place to go.

We are irritated by rascals, intolerant of fools, and prepared to love the rest. But where are they?

Women flirt to keep their stock high, men to get somewhere.

My thoughts, I guess, are bitter; who but the bitter have thoughts?

Neurotics make poor patriots; if you're ashamed of something as big as yourself, it's hard to be proud of something as small as your country.

A bore: one who knows as well as you do what he is going to say next.

Each day, the American housewife turns toward television as toward a lover. She feels guilty about it, and well she might, for he's covered with warts and is only after her money.

One day you are an apprentice, and everybody's pet; the next, you are coldly expected to deliver. There is never sufficient warning that the second day is coming.

The neurotic doesn't know how to cope with his emotional bills; some he keeps paying over and over, others he never pays at all.

The plague of government is senile delinquency.

Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.

Anything you do from the heart enriches you, but sometimes not till years later.

Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.

My doctor is nice; every time I see him, I'm ashamed of what I think of doctors in general.

Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality.

Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you.

I tell you this, and I tell you plain: What you have done, you will do again; You will bite your tongue, careful or not, Upon the already-bitten spot.

In retrospect, our triumphs could as easily have happened to someone else; but our defeats are uniquely our own.

It must infuriate our children to see us always so much more forbearing with everybody else's.

The way the neurotic sees it: bars on his door mean that he's locked in; bars on your door mean that he's locked out.

Neurotics expect you to remember all the things that they tell you, and many that they don't.

If you see in your children most of your own faults, you have failed as a parent, but succeeded as a neurotic.

Don't look for God where He is needed most; if you didn't bring Him there, He isn't there.

If the pain wanders, do not waste your time with doctors.

When we discuss those we love with those who do not love them, the end of love is near.

How tired God must be of guilt and loneliness, for that is all we ever bring to Him.

Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun.

The trouble with women is men; the trouble with men, men.

All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.

The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother's Day are the good ones.

How can a man marry wisely in his twenties? The girl he's going to wind up wanting hasn't even been born.

We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.

A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species.

Your children tell you casually years later what it would have killed you with worry to know at the time.