Margaret Deland
... is there anything more unjust than to build gold and brass and iron on poor, well-meaning clay, -- and then blame the clay when the whole image falls into dust?Collection: Fall
What I object to in Mother is that she wants me to think her thoughts. Apart from the question of hypocrisy, I prefer my own.Collection: Mother
Absurdity is the one thing love can't stand; it can overlook anything else, -- coldness, or weakness, or viciousness, -- but just be ridiculous and that's the end of it!Collection: Weakness
... when personal happiness conflicts with any great human ideal, the right to claim such happiness is as nothing compared to the privilege of resigning it.Collection: Privilege
In connection with death, or birth, or love, modesty is only a rather puerile self-consciousness.Collection: Self
I notice that when people have no sense of responsibility, you call them either criminals or geniuses.Collection: Responsibility
By some mysterious method, Susan Carr's gossip gave the listener a gentler feeling towards his kind. When she spoke of her neighbors' faults, one knew that somehow they were simply virtues gone to seed.Collection: Gossip
the attempt to break a habit of years is necessarily experimental.Collection: Years
Nature is perfectly impartial. Brain has no sex!Collection: Sex
a manufactured interest has no staying quality - especially if it involves any hard work.Collection: Hard Work
Lawyers make their cake by cooking up other people's troubles.Collection: Cake
When it comes to bombshells, there are few that can be more effective than that small, flat, frail thing, a letter.Collection: Bombshells
Some time in our lives every man and woman of us, putting out our hands toward the stars, touch on either side our prison walls the immutable limitations of temperamentCollection: Stars
There isn't any virtue where there has never been any temptation.Collection: Temptation
moral vanity is the snare of good people.Collection: Vanity
Grief is the price Love pays for being in the same world with Death.Collection: Grief
Age, with shamefaced relief, has learned the solvent quality of Time. It is this quality which makes possible the contemplation of certain embarrassing heavenly reunions.Collection: Age
There's one thing that always interests me about you good people, not your certainty that the rest of us are swine, - no doubt we are, - but your certainty that your opinions are pearls.Collection: People
Books are like sapphires; they must be polished - polished! or else you insult your readers.Collection: Book
To talk over a quarrel, with its inevitable accompaniment of self-justification, is too much like handling cobwebs to be very successful.Collection: Successful
the blue and cloudless day closes like the lid of a casket of jewels upon the violet rim of sea, and shuts out the light.Collection: Light
... there must be reserves -- except with God. The human soul is solitary. But for confession that is different; justice and reparation sometimes demand it; but, again, justice and courage sometimes forbid it.Collection: Justice
When two duties jostle each other, one of 'em isn't a duty.Collection: Two
silence is very moving to youth, for who knows what it hides?Collection: Moving
... some of the things floating about in the Well of Memory are not worth recording.Collection: Memories
a short cut to matrimonial unhappiness is not to have the same taste in jokes!Collection: Cutting
... in a wicked way, it is an incentive to good living to observe the spice of enjoyment there is to a godly soul in a very little sin.Collection: Godly
faith, it seems to me, is not the holding of certain dogmas; it is simply openness and readiness of heart to believe any truth which God may show.Collection: Faith
gossip, after it reaches a certain point of insult and falsehood, becomes a source of amusement to its victims.Collection: Gossip
... if a man really and truly believed that black was white, you might advise him to see an oculist, but you mustn't call him a liar.Collection: Liars
Convictions do not imply reasons.Collection: Reason
... Love never forgets; or if it does, it is an imperfect love, like the beautiful love of a dog, faithful and unreasoning.Collection: Beautiful
Conscience that isn't hitched up to common sense is a mighty dangerous thing.Collection: Common Sense
nothing is as conventional as adolescence.Collection: Adolescence
... it is curious how fatal it is, either to a situation or to an individual, or even to a name, if in an evil moment it becomes funny.Collection: Names
A sneer is like a flame; it may occasionally be curative because it cauterizes, but it leaves a bitter scar.Collection: Positive