Quotes from Margaret Oliphant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always 20 times better.

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always 20 times better.

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

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