Phyllis Bottome Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Phyllis Bottome
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.

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

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

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

Phyllis Bottome
He was so nearly honest a man, that his undigested lie, mortally disagreed with him.

Phyllis Bottome
The boy still has that uneasy half-deluded love a man never wholly loses for his mother.

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

Phyllis Bottome
[She] pronounced vowels as if they were a little indecent, and one had better get back to consonants as quickly as possible.

Phyllis Bottome
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.

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

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

Phyllis Bottome
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.

Phyllis Bottome
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 is its own defense.

Phyllis Bottome
What most people tell you a confidence for is to get something off their chest which hasn't really been on it. They don't necessarily want to hide the truth from you, but they're out to hide it from themselves.

Phyllis Bottome
He must have known how to shut a train door without banging it, since half his life was spent in shutting doors. But no doubt to an Italian ticket collector, these sharp concussions were one of the chief pleasures of his working day.

Phyllis Bottome
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.

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

Phyllis Bottome
She had developed a passionate longing for making other people comfortable at her own expense. The secret satisfactions of her heart had been when she succeeded in getting other people into armchairs, without their knowing she was doing it, and with nothing left for herself but something small and spiky in a corner.

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

Phyllis Bottome
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.

Phyllis Bottome
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.

Phyllis Bottome
However good photographs are nowadays, newspapers managed to turn likenesses into libels.

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

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

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

Phyllis Bottome
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!

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

Phyllis Bottome
She had settled down to age as if she found it very pleasant company.

Phyllis Bottome