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  • Rose Macaulay
    • As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals--or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
    (topic: family)

  • Archibald MacLeish
    • Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
    (topic: sports)

  • Maurice Maeterlinck
    • Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
    (topic: future)

  • Norman Mailer
    • He got a corporation mind. He don't believe in nature; he puts his trust and distrust in man.
    (topic: trust)

  • Bernard Malamud
    • Without heroes we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
    (topic: heroes)

  • Robert Mallet
    • How many pessimists end up by desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right.
    (topic: pessimism)

  • David Mamet
    • We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder "censorship," we call it "concern for commercial viability."
    (topic: censorship and free speech)

  • Nelson Mandela
    • Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.
    (topic: idealism)

  • Thomas Mann
    • A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
    (topic: death)

    This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
    (topic: love)

    Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
    (topic: new year)

    All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
    (topic: medicine)

  • Marya Mannes
    • Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow,
    The faucet leak, and learn to leave them so.
    (topic: leisure)

  • Marcel Marceau
    • Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
    (topic: silence)

  • Edwin Markham
    • Oft when the white, still dawn
    Lifted the skies and pushed the hills apart,
    I have felt it like a glory in my heart.
    (topic: morning)

  • Christopher Marlowe
    • Virtue is the fount whence honour springs.
    (topic: honor)

  • John P. Marquand
    • If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber.
    (topic: writing)

  • Don Marquis
    • it is better to be happy
    for a moment
    and be burned up with beauty
    than to live a long time
    and be bored all the while
    (topic: happiness)

  • Harriet Martineau
    • Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
    (topic: reading)

  • Andrew Marvell
    • But at my back I always hear
    Time's winged chariot hurrying near.
    (topic: time)

  • Groucho Marx
    • I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.
    (topic: television)

  • W. Somerset Maugham
    • It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
    (topic: age)

    Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
    (topic: beauty)

    The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.
    (topic: creativity)

    It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
    (topic: friendship)

    We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
    (topic: friendship)

    Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
    (topic: imagination)

    When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
    (topic: kindness)

    We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
    (topic: love)

    In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.
    (topic: night)

    The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.
    (topic: success)

    Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
    (topic: perfection)

  • François Mauriac
    • By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
    (topic: age)

  • André Maurois
    • The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion, but rather to know it.
    (topic: arguing)

  • Rollo May
    • Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.
    (topic: creativity)

  • Giuseppe Mazzini
    • The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfilment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the joys of the Family.
    (topic: family)

  • Mary McCarthy
    • Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
    (topic: regret)

  • William McFee
    • People don't seem to realize that doing what's right's no guarantee against misfortune.
    (topic: misfortune)

  • Phyllis McGinley
    • The thing to remember about fathers is, they're men.
    A girl has to keep it in mind:
    They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues.
    Scratch any father, you find
    Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors,
    Believing change is a threat-
    Like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle
    It took such months to get.
    (topic: fathers)

    Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.
    (topic: gossip)

    I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.
    (topic: men and women)

    Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
    Aimed with angry art,
    Words can sting like anything.
    But silence breaks the heart.
    (topic: silence)

  • William Mcilvanney
    • Good lies need a leavening of truth to make them palatable.
    (topic: lying)

  • Marshall McLuhan
    • Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America--not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
    (topic: television)

    When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
    (topic: business)

  • Margaret Mead
    • I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. And as I had my father's kind of mind-which was also his mother's-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.
    (topic: mind)

    Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
    (topic: mediocrity)

  • Sir Peter Medawar
    • Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in...Fear and resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood.
    (topic: change)

  • H. L. Mencken
    • No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
    (topic: flirtation)

    Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later, for another thing, they die earlier.
    (topic: men and women)

    School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense amd common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
    (topic: school)

    No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.
    (topic: trust)

    It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
    (topic: idealism)

  • Owen Meredith
    • Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
    (topic: genius)

  • Thomas Merton
    • The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!
    (topic: success)

  • Edna St. Vincent Millay
    • The most I ever did for you was to outlive you.
    But that is much.
    (topic: solitude-loneliness)

    To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak;
    Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
    Tea was such a comfort.
    (topic: maturity)

    I have loved badly, loved the great
    Too soon, withdrawn my words too late;
    And eaten in an echoing hall
    Alone and from a chipped plate
    The words that I withdrew too late.
    (topic: regret)

  • Emily Miller
    • Then sing, young hearts that are full of cheer,
    With never a thought of sorrow;
    The old goes out, but the glad young year
    Comes merrily in tomorrow.
    (topic: new year)

    Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
    (topic: regret)

    If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
    (topic: travel)

    Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.
    (topic: success)

    If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
    (topic: ambition)

    Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
    (topic: body)

  • Kate Millett
    • Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.
    (topic: men and women)

  • C. Wright Mills
    • The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.
    (topic: fame)

  • A. A. Milne
    • My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.
    (topic: education)

    What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.
    (topic: food)

  • Octave Mirbeau
    • When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.
    (topic: soul)

  • Mistinguett
    • A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point.
    (topic: kissing)

  • Langdon Mitchell
    • Marriage is three parts love and seven parts forgiveness of sins.
    (topic: marriage)

  • Nancy Mitford
    • "Twenty-three and a quarter minutes past," Uncle Matthew was saying furiously, "in precisely six and three-quarter minutes the damned fella will be late."
    (topic: punctuality)

  • Wilson Mizner
    • I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.
    (topic: doubt)

  • Molière
    • There is no praise to bear the sort that you put in your pocket.
    (topic: praise)

    One should eat to live, not live to eat.
    (topic: food)

  • Jacques Lucien Monod
    • Man knows in the end that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe from which he has emerged by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty is written down anywhere.
    (topic: atheism)

  • Marilyn Monroe
    • I've been on a calendar, but never on time.
    (topic: punctuality)

  • Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
    • The pretty fellows you speak of, I own entertain me sometimes, but is it impossible to be diverted with what one despises? I can laugh at a puppet show, at the same time I know there is nothing in it worth my attention or regard.
    (topic: flirtation)

    Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it ought to be treated as a common enemy.
    (topic: religion)

  • Michel de Montaigne
    • If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.
    (topic: friendship)

    No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.
    (topic: indecision)

    Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.
    (topic: fame)

  • Montesquieu
    • I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
    (topic: reading)

  • Maria Montessori
    • If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?
    (topic: education)

  • Gerald Moor
    • The most vigilant self-criticism of course is necessary, but the time comes when the artist must tell himself he is good or he will go under.
    (topic: perfection)

  • Thomas Moore
    • Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
    (topic: love)

    Marriage is an Athenic weaving together of families, of two souls with their individual fates and destinies, of time and eternity--everyday life married to the timeless mysteries of the soul.
    (topic: marriage)

    The world's made up of individuals who don't want to be heroes.
    (topic: mediocrity)

  • Paul Morand
    • Mirrors are ice which do not melt: what melts are those who admire themselves in them.
    (topic: vanity)

  • John Morley
    • You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
    (topic: censorship and free speech)

    Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.
    (topic: dance)

  • Sir Claus Moser
    • Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.
    (topic: education)

  • Iris Murdoch
    • Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
    (topic: death)

    Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
    (topic: responsibility)