Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.

Desire is in men a hunger, in women only an appetite.

A hypochondriac is one who has a pill for everything except what ails him.

It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.

The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.

We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. They might not return it; or worse, they might.

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.

They threaten me with lung cancer, and still I smoke and smoke. If they'd only threaten me with hard work, I might stop.

Pity all newlyweds. She cooks something nice for him, and he brings her flowers, and they kiss and think: How easy marriage is.

Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.

We waste a lot of time running after people we could have caught by just standing still.

The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.

Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense.

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

Men feel that women somehow drag them down, and women feel that way about men. It's possible that both are right.

A first-rate marriage is like a first-rate hotel: expensive, but worth it.

Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.

Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.

Many beautiful women have been made happy by their own beauty, but no intelligent woman has ever been made happy by her own intelligence.

Vanity, revenge, loneliness, boredom, all apply: lust is one of the least of the reasons for promiscuity.

Every group feels strong once it has found a scapegoat.

For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.

Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before.

We are all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.

Albert Einstein when asked what he considered to be the most powerful force in the universe answered: Compound interest!

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.

Love is often gentle, desire always a rage.

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.

If your children spend most of their time in other people's houses, you're lucky; if they all congregate at your house, you're blessed.

Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.

The plague of government is senile delinquency.

No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.

Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.

Goods are displayed by thousands of shopkeepers with a sense of beauty that finds no other outlet.

Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.

The young are generally full of revolt, and are often pretty revolting about it.

Neurotics would like to sleep all the time, and to be awakened only when there is good news.

If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail.

Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what's missing.

You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.

Don't be yourself - be someone a little nicer.

Boredom is often the cause of promiscuity, and always its result.

The ideal home: big enough for you to hear the children, but not very well.

Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.

Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't.

What a shame that allowances have to stop with the teens: both those that are paid to us and those that are made for us.

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.