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.

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

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

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

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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