Quote

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

Margaret Halsey

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Facing
Actually
Idea
Reality
Ideas
Mean
People

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

Image
Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
Margaret Halsey
Image
... it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
Margaret Halsey
Image
... the English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.
Margaret Halsey
Image
people coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.
Margaret Halsey
Image
This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.
Margaret Halsey
Image
American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.
Margaret Halsey
Image
A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.
Margaret Halsey
Image
English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.
Margaret Halsey
Image
A business society, therefore, always has in its children a large group of individuals who cannot make money and who do not understand (or want to understand) the profit motive. In short, they are subversives.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.
Margaret Halsey
Image
In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Americans (I, I'm afraid, among them) go around carelessly assuming they're tolerant the way they go around carelessly saying, 'You ought to be in pictures.' But in the clinches, they turn out to be tolerant about as often as they turn out to be Clark Gable.
Margaret Halsey
Image
In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
Margaret Halsey