Phyllis McGinley Quotes
Most popular Phyllis McGinley Quotes
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity.
Ah, snug lies those that slumber Beneath Conviction's roof.
This is the gist of what I know: Give advice and buy a foe.
Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.
Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides that necessary roughage in the literary diet.
Sticks and stones are hard on bones. Aimed with angry art, Words can sting like anything. But silence breaks the heart.
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.
In a successful marriage, there is no such thing as one's way. There is only the way of both, only the bumpy, dusty, difficult, but always mutual path.
Women are not men's equals in anything except responsibility. We are not their inferiors, either, or even their superiors. We are quite simply different races.
Relations are errors that Nature makes. Your spouse you can put on the shelf. But your friends, dear friends, are the quaint mistakes You always commit yourself.
Praise is warming and desirable and it is what the human race lives on like bread. But praise is an earned thing. It has to be deserved like an honorary degree or a hug from a child.
Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.
Children from ten to twenty don't want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated.
Ah, snug lies those that slumber Beneath Conviction's roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, Their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever And cold sleep all my kind, For I was born to shiver In the draft of an open mind.
Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man's. It is in the boys' gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.
One applauds the industry of professional philanthropy. But it has its dangers. After a while the private heart begins to harden. We fling letters into the wastebasket, are abrupt to telephoned solicitations. Charity withers in the incessant gale.
For the wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers, got hungry, scolded God, were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.
To be a housewife is a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed.
In a successful marriage, there is no such thing as one's way. There is only the way of both, only the bumpy, dusty, difficult, but always mutual path!
