Margaret Oliphant

“To have a man who can flirt is next thing to indispensable to a leader of society.”

“Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought.”

“What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?”

“For everybody knows that it requires very little to satisfy the gentlemen, if a woman will only give her mind to it.”

“It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.”

“As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.”

“Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.”