Phyllis Bottome Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Feelings change facts.

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

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.

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

Truth is its own defense.

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

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

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.

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!

it is better in the long run to be cheated than to cheat. I have learned that there is no middle way.

Some of us cling to our curses if we haven't anything better to cling to!

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

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

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

If one has one cow, it is always better not to be too familiar with those who have seven.