Phyllis Bottome Quotes

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

Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from within.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Time indeed has very little to do with living except at its beginning or near its end.

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.

She believed in letting children have a certain amount of rope, and only intervened at the last moment, in order to prevent their hanging themselves by it.

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

What are so mysterious as the eyes of a child?

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

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

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.

all daughters, even when most aggravated by their mothers, have a secret respect for them. They believe perhaps that they can do everything better than their mothers can, and many things they can do better, but they have not yet lived long enough to be sure how successfully they will meet the major emergencies of life, which lie, sometimes quite creditably, behind their mothers.

When lightning strikes, the mouse is sometimes burned with the farm.

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

Anger is like mild, it should not be kept too long.

Things that happen, however painful they are at the time, do not matter very much for long. Only how we behave to them matters.

the unfortunate thing about worldliness is that its rewards are rather less than its appetites.

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.

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

... can life be made undignified by any act of man?

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

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

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

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.

Every hen thinks she has laid the best egg! Can we not all believe as we choose? But the choice of others - what is that to us? Let them alone.

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.

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?

artists are exposed to great temptations: their eyes see paradise before their souls have reached it, and that is a great danger.

To be in the right is often an expensive business.

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

In my early life, and probably even today, it is not sufficiently understood that a child's education should include at least a rudimentary grasp of religion, sex, and money. Without a basic knowledge of these three primary facts in a normal human being's life --subjects which stir the emotions, create events and opportunities, and if they do not wholly decide must greatly influence an individual's personality --no human being's education can have a safe foundation.

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

It is a very dangerous thing to have an idea that you will not practice.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

with courage a human being is safe enough. And without it - he is never for one instant safe!

to everything there is an end - except fear.

There is no thermometer for wants!

death ... is not a great affair! Think - it happens once only - to each of us - as birth does. What do you know about being born? that - and no more - will you know about the act of death.

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

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