Quotes from Phyllis Bottome

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be in the right is often an expensive business.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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