Quote

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.

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
Humans
Important
Thing
Motivation
Beings
Human

More quotes by 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
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
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
Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
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
In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Example is better than precept.
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
The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality
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
Image
The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.
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
We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.
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
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
It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey