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
No woman wants to see herself too clearly.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Love is often gentle, desire always a rage.
—Mignon McLaughlin
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
In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
Throughout our lives, we see in the mirror the same innocent trusting face we have seen there since childhood.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy
If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Letters
The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Courage, The Present
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
When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Adversity
Fields can lie fallow, but we can’t; we have less time.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Carpe-diem
It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren’t even good for you.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
Every society honors its live conformists
and its dead troublemakers.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Conformity, Risk-taking, Society
Luck: when your burst of energy doesn’t run afoul of someone else’s.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Luck
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: Friends and Friendship, Friendship
With men, as with women, the main struggle is between vanity and comfort; but with men, comfort often wins.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Defense
We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love, One liners
Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren’t even there before.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Men prefer brief praise, pitched high; women are satisfied with praise in a lower key, just so it goes on and on.
—Mignon McLaughlin
The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Worry
Women are afraid of mice and of murder, and of very little in between.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
We’re all born brave, trusting, and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Trust, Greed
Men really prefer reasonably attractive women; they go after the sensational ones to impress other men.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Past and Present, Past
The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: People
There’s nothing wrong with most men’s egos that the kowtowing of a headwaiter can’t cure.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hope, Feelings
What we forgive too freely doesn’t stay forgiven.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Forgiveness
Women are the right age for just a few years; men, for most of their lives.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
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
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
People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Courage
Women are never landlocked: they’re always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Crying, Women
Many of us are equal to life’s emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Happiness
“Your money, or your life”. We know what to do when a burglar makes this demand of us, but not when God does.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
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