Margaret Oliphant

There's looks as speaks as strong as words.

— Margaret Oliphant

There is nothing so costly as bargains.

— Margaret Oliphant

All perfection is melancholy.

— Margaret Oliphant

“The eye is deceitful as well as the heart.”

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

Terror of being found out is not always a preservative, it sometimes hurries on the act which it ought to prevent.

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

The ideal is the flower-garden of the mind, and very apt to run to weeds unless carefully tended.

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

Laughing is not the first expression of joy. ... A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing,…

— Margaret Oliphant

I have my own way of dividing people, as I suppose most of us have. There are those whom I can talk…

— Margaret Oliphant

... I have always been a disappointment to my friends. I have no gift of talk, not much to say; and though…

— 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

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a…

— Margaret Oliphant

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through…

— Margaret Oliphant

“I suppose every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that which comes after it.…

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

“She did not move, except now and then to put up her hand and dry the moisture which collected slowly under her…

— Margaret Oliphant

Against the long years when family bonds make up all that is happiest in life, there must always be reckoned those moments…

— Margaret Oliphant

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to…

— Margaret Oliphant

“Was that what they called the natural lot of women? to suffer, perhaps to share the blame, but have no share in…

— Margaret Oliphant

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and…

— Margaret Oliphant

I scarcely remember any writer who has ever ventured to say that the half of the work of the world is actually…

— Margaret Oliphant

... up to this date, I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My…

— Margaret Oliphant

“And there has been no attempt to investigate it,' I said, 'to see what it really is?' 'Eh, Cornel,' said the coachman's…

— Margaret Oliphant

“Brentwood stands on that fine and wealthy slope of country, one of the richest in Scotland, which lies between the Pentland Hills…

— Margaret Oliphant

“As Sandy and his wife warmed to the tale, one tripping up another in their eagerness to tell everything, it gradually developed…

— Margaret Oliphant

“The village lay in the hollow, and climbed, with very prosaic houses, the other side. Village architecture does not flourish in Scotland.…

— Margaret Oliphant

“This was true enough, though it did not throw any light upon my perplexity. If we had heard of it to start…

— Margaret Oliphant

“It was getting dark by the time I went out, and nobody who knows the country will need to be told how…

— Margaret Oliphant

I think reading a novel is almost next best to having something to do.

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

It is so seldom in this world that things come just when they are wanted.

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that which comes after it.

— Margaret Oliphant