39 Margot Asquith Quotes

Margot Asquith quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. He's very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head.

6. She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake.

7. He couldn't see a belt without hitting below it.

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

9. The t is silent, as in Harlow.

10. Kitchener, a great man or a great poster?

11. The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

12. ... no matter where she takes off from, she brings the discourse back to Margot Asquith. Such singleness of purpose is met but infrequently.

13. Through the pages of [her book] Lay Sermons walk the great. I don't say that Margot Asquith actually permits us to rub elbows with them ourselves, but she willingly shows us her own elbow, which has been, so to say, honed on the mighty.

1. He has a brilliant mind until he makes it up.

2. Stafford Cripps has a brilliant mind, until he makes it up.

3. He could never see a belt without hitting below it.

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

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

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

7. You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius.

8. 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.

9. She spends her day powdering her face till she looks like a bled pig.

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

11. What a pity, when Christopher Colombus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

12. Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

13. The Almighty is a wonderful handicapper: He will not give us everything.

14. 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.

15. If Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster.

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

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

18. 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.

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

20. I have no face, only two profiles clapped together.

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

22. His modesty amounts to deformity.

23. 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.

24. It is not dying, but living, that is a preparation for Death.

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

26. I do not say I was ever what I would call "plain," but I have the sort of face that bores me when I see it on other people.