Margot Asquith famous quotes

It is easier to influence strong than weak characters in life.
-- Margot Asquith

#Strong #Character #Influence

His modesty amounts to deformity.
-- Margot Asquith

#Modesty #Deformity

The capacity to suffer varies more than anything that I have observed in human nature.
-- Margot Asquith

#Suffering #Human Nature #Capacity

He's very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head.
-- Margot Asquith

#Sarcastic #Clever #Brain

My father's nature turned out no waste product; he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He took his own happiness with him.
-- Margot Asquith

#Attitude #Lying #Father

The spirit is an inward flame; a lamp the world blows upon but never puts out.
-- Margot Asquith

#Spiritual #Blow #Flames

Although I am not stupid, the mathematical side of my brain is like dumb notes upon a damaged piano.
-- Margot Asquith

#Stupid #Math #Piano

The Bible tells us to forgive our enemies, not our friends
-- Margot Asquith

#Inspiration #Forgiving #Enemy

There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.
-- Margot Asquith

#Greatness #Men #Intellectual

To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has never had a chance, poor devil, you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.
-- Margot Asquith

#Marriage #Strong #Character

Rich men's houses are seldom beautiful, rarely comfortable, and never original. It is a constant source of surprise to people of moderate means to observe how little a big fortune contributes to Beauty.
-- Margot Asquith

#Beautiful #Mean #Men

Stafford Cripps has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.
-- Margot Asquith

#Mind #Brilliant #Brilliant Minds

I have no face, only two profiles clapped together.
-- Margot Asquith

#Two #Together #Faces

Lloyd George? There is no Lloyd George. There is a marvellous brain; but if you were to shut him in a room and look through the keyhole there would be nobody there.
-- Margot Asquith

#Brain #Would Be #Looks

If Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster.
-- Margot Asquith

#Men #Posters #Great Men

There are some people that you cannot change, you must either swallow them whole or leave them alone.
-- Margot Asquith

#People

Haunted from my early youth by the transitoriness and pathos of life, I was aware that it is not enough to say "I am doing no harm," I ought to be testing myself daily, and asking myself what I am really achieving.
-- Margot Asquith

#Achievement #Asking #Youth

The first element of greatness is fundamental humbleness (this should not be confused with servility); the second is freedom from self; the third is intrepid courage, which, taken in its widest interpretation, generally goes with truth; and the fourth-the power of love-although I have put it last, is the rarest.
-- Margot Asquith

#Confused #Taken #Greatness

She spends her day powdering her face till she looks like a bled pig.
-- Margot Asquith

#Sarcastic #Pigs #Looks

He could never see a belt without hitting below it.
-- Margot Asquith

#Sarcastic #Hitting #Belts

She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake.
-- Margot Asquith

#Sarcastic #Lying #Ice

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.
-- Margot Asquith

#Signposts #Imaginative #Symbols

Truthfulness with me is hardly a virtue. I cannot discriminate between truths that and those that don't need to be told.
-- Margot Asquith

#Needs #Virtue #Truthfulness

The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. . . . There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.
-- Margot Asquith

#Kings #Ideas #People

It is always dangerous to generalize, but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.
-- Margot Asquith

#Strong #Thinking #Race

What a pity, when Christopher Colombus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.
-- Margot Asquith

#America #Pity

There is nothing more perplexing in life than to know at what point you should surrender your intellect to your faith.
-- Margot Asquith

#Surrender #Should #Intellect

From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.
-- Margot Asquith

#War #Men #Expression

All I can say about my mind is that, like a fire carefully laid by a good housemaid, it is one that any match will light ...
-- Margot Asquith

#Fire #Light #Mind

[On Austen Chamberlain:] He is more loyal to his friends than to his convictions.
-- Margot Asquith

#Loyal #Politician #Conviction

Convictions no doubt have to be modified or expanded to meet changing conditions but ... to be a reliable political leader sooner or later your anchors must hold fast where other men's drag.
-- Margot Asquith

#Men #Anchors #Leader

I have always wanted to be a man, if only for the reason that I would like to have gauged the value of my intellect.
-- Margot Asquith

#Men #Reason #Intellect

[On spiritualism:] I always knew the living talked rot, but it's nothing to the rot the dead talk.
-- Margot Asquith

#Spiritualism

[To Jean Harlow, who repeatedly mispronounced her first name:] No, no, Jean. The t is silent, as in Harlow.
-- Margot Asquith

#Names #Firsts #Silent

Too much brilliance has its disadvantages, and misplaced wit may raise a laugh, but often beheads a topic of profound interest.
-- Margot Asquith

#Profound #Laughing #May

[To her host upon leaving a party:] Don't think it hasn't been charming, because it hasn't.
-- Margot Asquith

#Party #Thinking #Leaving

The power to love what is purely abstract is given to few.
-- Margot Asquith

#Abstract #Given

the announcement that you are going to tell a good story (and the chuckle that precedes it) is always a dangerous opening.
-- Margot Asquith

#Stories #Storytelling #Announcements

I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.
-- Margot Asquith

#Book #Play #Long

My dear old friend King George V told me he would never have died but for that vile doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn.
-- Margot Asquith

#Kings #Doctors #Old Friends

You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius....
-- Margot Asquith

#Genius #Talent

If you have been sunned through and through like an apricot on a wall from your earliest days, you are oversensitive to any withdrawal of heat.
-- Margot Asquith

#Wall #Adversity #Withdrawal

I was born in the country of Hogg and Scott between the Yarrow and the Tweed, in the year 1864.
-- Margot Asquith

#Country #Book #Years

My sort of looks are of the kind that bore me when I see them on other people.
-- Margot Asquith

#People #Looks #Kind

It is not dying, but living, that is a preparation for Death.
-- Margot Asquith

#Death #Preparation #Dying

The Almighty is a wonderful handicapper: He will not give us everything.
-- Margot Asquith

#God #Giving #Wonderful

Rumor is untraceable, incalculable, and infectious.
-- Margot Asquith

#Gossip #Rumor

Till I see money spent on the betterment of man instead of on his idleness and destruction, I shall not believe in any perfect form of government ...
-- Margot Asquith

#Believe #Men #Perfect