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.)
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Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what’s missing.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love, One liners
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
Happiness is like the penny candy of our youth: we got a lot more for our money back when we had no money.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Happiness
Always live up to your standards – by lowering them, if necessary.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Perfection
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
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
Life marks us all down, so it’s just as well that we start out by overpricing ourselves.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Confidence
Few women care what a man looks like, and a good thing too.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
There’s an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Family
Too much money is as demoralizing as too little, and there’s no such thing as exactly enough.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
With men, as with women, the main struggle is between vanity and comfort; but with men, comfort often wins.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
There are whole years for which I hope I’ll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Time
Women polish the silver and water the plants and wait to be really needed.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
We catch frightful glimpses of ourselves in the hostile eyes of others.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Self-Discovery
People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
Many of us are equal to life’s emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
No woman wants to see herself too clearly.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: People
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
Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hope, Feelings
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
Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had. … .
—Mignon McLaughlin
Courage can’t see around corners, but goes around them anyway.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Courage
Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: One liners, Love
Anywhere you go liking everyone, everyone will be likeable.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Attitude
True remorse is never just a regret over consequence; it is a regret over motive.
—Mignon McLaughlin
When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Adversity
A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
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
Albert Einstein when asked what he considered to be the most powerful force in the universe answered: Compound interest! What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Change, Value
Men who don’t like girls with brains don’t like girls.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
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
It’s impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Integrity
All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
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
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
We are keenly aware of the faults of our friends, but if they like us enough it doesn’t matter.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Friendship
A woman’s mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
We have to call it “freedom”: who’d want to die for “a lesser tyranny?”
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Freedom
Every society honors its live conformists
and its dead troublemakers.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Society, Conformity, Risk-taking
Women who feel naked without their lipstick are well over thirty.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love, Realistic Expectations
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
Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Confidence
Love is often gentle, desire always a rage.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Women go to beauty parlors for the unmussed look men hate.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
People will disapprove of you if you’re unhappy, or if you’re happy in The Wrong Way.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy
We welcome passion, for the mind is briefly let off duty.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Self-confidence grows on trees, in other people’s orchards.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Confidence
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
Those who are brutally honest are seldom so with themselves.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Self-Discovery
Men prefer brief praise, pitched high; women are satisfied with praise in a lower key, just so it goes on and on.
—Mignon McLaughlin
If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Letters
Women are never landlocked: they’re always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women, Crying
Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Boredom, Opportunities
Never is a long, long word, but it’s less frustrating than “God knows when”.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Perspective
The time to begin most things is ten years ago.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Procrastination
Minor vices lead to major ones, but minor virtues stay put.
—Mignon McLaughlin
People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Courage
Throughout our lives, we see in the mirror the same innocent trusting face we have seen there since childhood.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy
Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren’t even good for you.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can’t.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else’s.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Kindness
It’s the most unhappy people who most fear change.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Unhappiness, Change, One liners
Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren’t even there before.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Happiness
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
We are irritated by rascals, intolerant of fools, and prepared to love the rest. But where are they?
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hypocrisy
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
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
Good-looking girls break hearts, and goodhearted girls mend them.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
Don’t be yourself – be someone a little nicer.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Kindness
Surrounded by people who love life, you love it too; surrounded by people who don’t, you don’t.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Attitude
When hope is hungry, everything feeds it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Hope
The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Past, Past and Present
The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Self-Discovery
All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
In any family, measles are less contagious than bad habits.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Habit
It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Boredom, Listening
Women are afraid of mice and of murder, and of very little in between.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Love
The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother’s Day are the good ones.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Mothers, Motherhood
Spite is never lonely; envy always tags along.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Anger
“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
Despair is anger with no place to go.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Adversity
Fields can lie fallow, but we can’t; we have less time.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Carpe-diem
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
When you let money speak for you, it drowns out anything else you meant to say.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
If it came true, it wasn’t much of a dream.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Goals
Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Manners
It’s innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn’t.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Innocence, Ignorance, Charm
If the pain wanders, do not waste your time with doctors.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Health
Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Worry
Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
Women are the right age for just a few years; men, for most of their lives.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Courage, The Present
There’s nothing wrong with most men’s egos that the kowtowing of a headwaiter can’t cure.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Men
Luck: when your burst of energy doesn’t run afoul of someone else’s.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Luck
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Writing
Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Anxiety, Worry
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
The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive – perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Death
A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Defense
If your husband expects you to laugh, do so; if he expects you to cry, don’t; if you don’t know what he expects, what are you doing married?
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Women
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
Without enthusiasm, virtue functions not at all, and vice only poorly.
—Mignon McLaughlin
I wish I’d said it first, and I don’t even know who did: The only problems that money can solve are money problems.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Money
What we forgive too freely doesn’t stay forgiven.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Forgiveness
We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Confidence
Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Life
A new wound makes all the old ones ache again.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Topics: Adversity
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
Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn’t either.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Midge Decter American Journalist
- Sydney J. Harris American Journalist
- Jim Bishop American Journalist
- H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
- Norman Cousins American Journalist
- Thomas Masson American Journalist
- B. C. Forbes Scottish-born American Journalist
- Dorothy Thompson American Journalist
- Brenda Ueland American Journalist
- Carl Bernstein American Journalist