Phyllis Bottome Quotes

To be in the right is often an expensive business.

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!

It's a good thing to learn early that other people's opinions do not matter, unless they happen to be true.

I am never at picnics. The ground was not meant to be sat upon in its raw state, I feel sure, and I prefer my food without either caterpillars or drafts!

This is the real tragedy of mankind, that until now the spirit of man has not been able to free itself, even along the path of its own development, from the tentacles of self-deception.

The two best subjects for conversation are talking shop and making love.

Truth, though it has many disadvantages, is at least changeless. You can always find it where you left it.

A red-hot belief in eternal glory is probably the best antidote to human panic that there is.

It is the possibilities which are the most terrible things in life.

When you know a person particularly well, you cannot escape their ruffled feelings.

Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it
and a greater fool if you count upon it.

Curses are children of hate; they belong to the wrong family! Prayers are better than curses!

Not being liked has a certain virtue about it, if the reason for the dislike does not lie in yourself!

Personally, I think it's a good way to let a child start right in with the laws of Nature before he's old enough to be surprised at them.

There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them.

Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness.

Life was a series of messes, and one spent one's time cleaning them up; if one had any heart at all one also gave a part of one's time to cleaning up those of other people.

A desire that has never been fulfilled is considerably less acute than one that has been fulfilled and then checked at the source.

There is nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final.

When we refuse to accept our limitations, Nature, who is a stern realist, pays us out.

The ears of the hunted grow even keener than a hunter's.

A man whose every exertion is bent upon showing up the flaws in his wife's character must be at least partially responsible for some of them.

It must depend as much upon the patient's willingness to be cured, as upon the physician's skill in curing. There is neither force not magic in psychiatry.

Human beings don't show, any more than cities at dusk, their real necessities! And yet if you looked
past the circle of outside lights, through the street walls still standing
into the want and emptiness within!

To be a Jew is to be strong with a strength that has outlived persecutions. It is to be wise against ignorance, honest against piracy, harmless against evil, kind against cruelty

If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.

If money had been the way to save the world, Christ himself would have been rich.

Curiosity is the only thing that really carries through time, isn't it? The creative curiosity, I mean, which fights its way into expression?

To everything there is an end - except fear.

Neither saints nor angels have ever increased my faith in this enigma Life; but what are called 'common men and women' have increased it.

Marriage! ... Why, it is like living in a thimble with a hippopotamus!

I wonder how often not the intention but the desire springs up in a doctor's mind: 'Can I let this human being out of the trap of Life?

Truth is its own defense.

Knowledge cannot be changed, but the use to which it may be put can very easily be changed.

To see a shadow and think it is a tree that is a pity; but to see a tree and to think it a shadow can be fatal.

A woman who has been a nun is never anything else.

We cannot alter facts, but we can alter our ways of looking at them.

If you listen long enough - or is it deep enough? - the silence of a lover can speak plainer than any words! Only you must know how to listen. Pain must have taught you how.

No emergency excuses you from exercising tolerance.

A refugee is as helpless as a new born child - but not so appealing! Besides, a new born child has no memories!

Jane had that happy disposition which would like to imagine that every one really wishes the well-being of his neighbour and struggles, though sometimes rather disastrously, to help him towards it.

The only creative power I know is that of what might roughly be called 'love'; not of course a sentimental love: a far more impersonal and less individual emotion. I sometimes think that migratory birds may have it for each other. They fly in the same direction, and have never been seen to interfere with each other's flights.

It is you men who make war! ... We, who have children, would never make it! Why should a woman be broken up in pain, to give her child life, only to see him carried away from her, to make food for guns?

A blossom must break the sheath it has been sheltered by.

All persecution is a sign of fear; for if we did not fear the power of an opinion different from our own, we should not mind others holding it.

That a Jew is despised or persecuted is bad for him, of course-but far worse for the Christian who does it-for although persecuted he can remain a good Jew-whereas no Christian who persecutes can possibly remain-if he ever was one-a good Christian.

Love comes into your being like a tidal wave ... sometimes it withdraws like a wave, till there isn't such a thing as a pool left, and every bit of your heart is as dry as seaweed beyond the wave's reach.

When a reserved person once begins to talk, nothing can stop him; and he does not want to have to listen, until he has quite finished his unfamiliar exertion.

Death deceives relations often, and doctors sometimes, but the patient - never.

People who talk of new lives believe there will be no new troubles.