Phyllis Bottome Quotes - Page 2

... one pets what one degrades; and one has to support what one has enfeebled

Our responsibility to ourselves comes first -- because in a sense what one is oneself is the responsibility that one has for others!

No emergency excuses you from exercising tolerance.

Taboos on the human heart are more dangerous than any risk we run by using our emotions. Sensation is the life of man; it is his actual energy. To suppress it is to lose creative power!

Morale is not a single instinct. It has many ingredients. A sense of personal responsibility, the natural courage of an individual, the amount of his acquired self-discipline -- and above all his interest in others -- these together make up the spirit of morale.

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

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

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.

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

We do good by ourselves, but we seldom do wrong alone.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

What are so mysterious as the eyes of a child?

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

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.

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