Mignon McLaughlin (1913–83) was an American journalist, author, and aphorist.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, McLaughlin attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She embarked on a career as a journalist and wrote short stories for such magazines as Vogue, Redbook, Glamor, and Cosmopolitan. With her husband, Time magazine editor Robert McLaughlin, Mignon co-authored the play Gayden (1948) for the 1949 Broadway season.
In the 1950s, McLaughlin began publishing aphorisms that were later accumulated in three tomes: The Neurotic’s Notebook (1963,) The Second Neurotic’s Notebook (1966,) and The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook (1981.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Mignon McLaughlin
Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Spite is never lonely; envy always tags along.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Anger
People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Happiness
No woman wants to see herself too clearly.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Carpe-diem
Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half-thought of it ourselves.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Ideas
When hope is hungry, everything feeds it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hope
Women flirt to keep their stock high, men to get somewhere.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: One liners
If it came true, it wasn’t much of a dream.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Goals
The plague of government is senile delinquency
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Government
We have to call it “freedom”: who’d want to die for “a lesser tyranny?”
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Freedom
Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can’t.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy, Morality
There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Action
Women go to beauty parlors for the unmussed look men hate.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
A woman’s mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.
—Mignon McLaughlin
In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
In any family, measles are less contagious than bad habits.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Habits, Habit
Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Confidence
Throughout our lives, we see in the mirror the same innocent trusting face we have seen there since childhood.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy
We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Self-Discovery
The young are generally full of revolt, and are often pretty revolting about it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Revolution
Whenever we safely land in a plane, we promise God a little something.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Flying
Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Age
People will disapprove of you if you’re unhappy, or if you’re happy in The Wrong Way.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy
All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Few women care what a man looks like, and a good thing too.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
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