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
Don’t fool yourself that important things can be put off till tomorrow; they can be put off forever, or not at all.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Procrastination
Many beautiful women have been made happy by their own beauty, but no intelligent woman has ever been made happy by her own intelligence.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Feminism
Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love, One liners
Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Worry, Anxiety
Don’t be yourself – be someone a little nicer.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Kindness
Women who feel naked without their lipstick are well over thirty.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
When you let money speak for you, it drowns out anything else you meant to say.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
True remorse is never just a regret over consequence; it is a regret over motive.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Morality, Hypocrisy
Fields can lie fallow, but we can’t; we have less time.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Carpe-diem
Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
A new wound makes all the old ones ache again.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Adversity
All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Happiness
Women are the right age for just a few years; men, for most of their lives.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation. And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Happiness, Planning, Chance
A woman’s mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Parents
Women are afraid of mice and of murder, and of very little in between.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Minor vices lead to major ones, but minor virtues stay put.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Vice
Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Character
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
With men, as with women, the main struggle is between vanity and comfort; but with men, comfort often wins.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Family
Men feel that women somehow drag them down, and women feel that way about men. It’s possible that both are right.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
How can a man marry wisely in his twenties? The girl he’s going to wind up wanting hasn’t even been born.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
What you can’t get out of, get into wholeheartedly.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Acceptance, Effort
We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else’s.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Kindness
Whenever we safely land in a plane, we promise God a little something.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Flying
The plague of government is senile delinquency
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Government
Good-looking girls break hearts, and goodhearted girls mend them.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
A woman asks little of love: only that she be able to feel like a heroine.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother’s Day are the good ones.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Mothers, Motherhood
Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had. … .
—Mignon McLaughlin
We have to call it “freedom”: who’d want to die for “a lesser tyranny?”
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Freedom
Always live up to your standards – by lowering them, if necessary.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Perfection
It’s terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have been broken. It’s particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Self-Discovery
If it came true, it wasn’t much of a dream.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Goals
Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love, One liners
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