Phyllis McGinley quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Phyllis McGinley on Wise Famous Quotes.

Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.

I am he / Who champions total liberty - / Intolerance being, ma'am, a state / No tolerant man can tolerate.

Time is the thief you cannot banish.

Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfaction of one's neighbor.

A mother's hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit she longs to hand you
Ripe on a plate. And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy

A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.

Ladies with curly hair / Have time to spare.

Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.

A lover would find life less broken apart after a misguided love affair if they could feel that they had been sinful rather than foolish.

I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.

Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat ...

Shunning the upstart shower, / The cold and cursory scrub, / I celebrate the power / That lies within the Tub.

This is the gist of what I know: Give advice and buy a foe.

How happy is the Optimist / To whom life shows its sunny side / His horse may lose, his ship may list, / But he always sees the funny side.

Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!

Love or perish" we are told and we tell ourselves. The phrase is true enough so long as we do not interpret it as "Mingle or be a failure.

O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.

Words may sting, but silence is what breaks the heart.

Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.

A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.

Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.

Stir the eggnog, lift the toddy, Happy New Year everybody.

Behind every myth lies a truth; beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.

Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.

If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

The knowingness of little girls, is hidden underneath their curls.

Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.

The ability to forget a sorrow is childhood's most enchanting feature.

These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?

Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry ...

Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.

There are books that one needs maturity to enjoy just as there are books an adult can come on too late to savor.

There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper; in being both bountiful and provident.

It is the leisured, I have noticed, who rebel the most at an interruption of routine.

Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?

Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.

The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art ...

It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde.

Suffering is as necessary to entertaining as vermouth is to a Martini - a small but vital ingredient.

The Enemy, who wears her mother's usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.

Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.

Those wearing tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.

What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.

Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations ...

Meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.