Elizabeth Bibesco Quotes

There is something very independent about French balloons - you feel you couldn't make a pet of one.

To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

A man who is available for lunch, has no wife, is interested in everything, and talks well is socially invaluable.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality.

What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible.

Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing - eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.

Are there any punishments in life but our joys turned against us?

He is invariably in a hurry being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.

The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows!

What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.

What an uncertain thing, marriage - what an elusive thing, happiness!

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

What you possess is not what you jingle in the pockets of your memory, but the imaginings with which you fill the spaces of the future.

Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.

There is nothing in the world like health. Live cleanly, and the high thinking will look after itself - or at least won't matter. Physical condition - there's nothing like it.

It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.

Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.

I do not know at what moment in life, if ever, we realise that we are neither George Sands nor Juliets. Of course, if we are not beautiful, we recognise early that beauty is nothing.

The image of ourselves in the minds of others is the picture of a stranger we shall never see.

Passion is no respecter of persons. She hardly seems to select her victims.

Isn't that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?

Perfect moments don't turn into half-hours.

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.

We learn nothing by being right.