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
Always live up to your standards – by lowering them, if necessary.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Perfection
Women are never landlocked: they’re always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Crying, Women
Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Manners
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
Women go to beauty parlors for the unmussed look men hate.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Men enjoy being thought of as hunters, but are generally too lazy to hunt. Women, on the other hand, love to hunt, but would rather nobody knew it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Writing
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Feelings, Hope
Says the rude child: “No, I won’t do it”. Says the courteous grown-up: “Yes, I won’t do it”.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Manners
Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren’t even good for you.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
When hope is hungry, everything feeds it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hope
Throughout our lives, we see in the mirror the same innocent trusting face we have seen there since childhood.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy
Many of us are equal to life’s emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
True remorse is never just a regret over consequence; it is a regret over motive.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Few women care what a man looks like, and a good thing too.
—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
In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Boredom, Listening
Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Fields can lie fallow, but we can’t; we have less time.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Carpe-diem
When you let money speak for you, it drowns out anything else you meant to say.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
Every society honors its live conformists
and its dead troublemakers.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Conformity, Risk-taking, Society
Minor vices lead to major ones, but minor virtues stay put.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Women who feel naked without their lipstick are well over thirty.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
It’s important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to the friendship that we are not.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship
Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Worry, Anxiety
An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners’ names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Writing
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
A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Self-Discovery
If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Letters
All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Too much money is as demoralizing as too little, and there’s no such thing as exactly enough.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Courage, The Present
Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had. … .
—Mignon McLaughlin
Men prefer brief praise, pitched high; women are satisfied with praise in a lower key, just so it goes on and on.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Despair is anger with no place to go.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Adversity
A woman asks little of love: only that she be able to feel like a heroine.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy, Morality
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