Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Mignon McLaughlin Journalist

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Jun 6, 1913
  • Died: Dec 20, 1983

Mignon McLaughlin was an American journalist and author. In the 1950s, she began publishing aphorisms that were later collected in three books, entitled, The Neurotic’s Notebook, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook and The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook. She is known for a number of quotes, among them:

"A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."

"Anything you lose automatically doubles in value."

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."

Mignon McLaughlin was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in New York City, where her mother, Joyce Neuhaus, was a prominent lawyer. She graduated from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1933 and returned to New York, where she embarked on a career as a journalist and a writer of short stories for Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and other women's magazines.

She worked for Vogue magazine in the 1940s, and was Copy Editor and Managing Editor of Glamour magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. She retired to Florida in 1973. She died in Coral Gables, Florida on December 20, 1983.

Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.

There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone but, years after, we know it was much later.

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.

It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we're going to show.

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.

For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.

It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.

No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

Courage can't see around corners but goes around them anyway.

A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.

We all become great explorers during our first few days in a new city, or a new love affair.

A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.

Youth is not enough. And love is not enough. And success is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough.

A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.

There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.

Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.