Daily Inspiration Quote by Mignon McLaughlin

McLaughlin’s line does a quiet magic trick: it turns “hope” from a haloed virtue into a piece of emotional self-management. The sentence is built like a mirror held up to the reader’s own interior weather. “Hope” isn’t framed as optimism about the world; it’s a secondary emotion, an emotion about an emotion. That recursive phrasing (“the feeling we have that the feeling we have”) mimics how anxiety and despair actually sound in the mind - looping, self-referential, almost claustrophobic. Then she slips in the release valve: “not permanent.”

The intent feels distinctly mid-century journalistic: practical, psychologically savvy, allergic to grandiosity. McLaughlin isn’t selling hope as a moral badge or a heroic stance. She’s offering it as a cognitive foothold when life goes sideways. The subtext is bracing: your current feeling may be ugly, but it’s also temporary; you don’t have to debate whether it’s justified, only whether it’s eternal. That’s a small shift with outsized power, because permanence is what makes pain feel like destiny.

Context matters here. Writing in an era that lived through depression, war, and the long, nervy shadows of the Cold War, McLaughlin’s hope is not naive. It’s endurance dressed in plain clothes. The line works because it refuses to argue with suffering; it only refuses to let suffering annex the future.