Margaret Oliphant

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution -- this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

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

— 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