Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

All perfection is melancholy.

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

“Don’t you think a certain amount of civilisation is necessary before picture-frames will become remunerative? I don’t think you could live by…

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— 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…

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

— 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

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

— Margaret Oliphant

It is often easier to justify one's self to others than to respond to the secret doubts that arise in one's own…

— 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

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

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

Truly there is nothing in the world so blessed or so sweet as the heritage of children.

— 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

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

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Margaret Oliphant

Imagination is the first faculty wanting in those that do harm to their kind

— Margaret Oliphant

There is nothing so costly as bargains.

— Margaret Oliphant