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.
It's a good thing to learn early that other people's opinions do not matter, unless they happen to be true.
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.
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.
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.
Time indeed has very little to do with living except at its beginning or near its end.
Curses are children of hate; they belong to the wrong family! Prayers are better than curses!
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.
Things that happen, however painful they are at the time, do not matter very much for long. Only how we behave to them matters.
Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it -- and a greater fool if you count upon it.
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 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!
A red-hot belief in eternal glory is probably the best antidote to human panic that there is.
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.
with courage a human being is safe enough. And without it - he is never for one instant safe!
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.
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.
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.
Neither saints nor angels have ever increased my faith in this enigma Life; but what are called 'common men and women' have increased it.
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.
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.
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?
