Princess Elizabeth Bibesco Quotes
Princess Elizabeth Bibesco offers thoughtful, plain-spoken insights on value, growth and social life that feel like a gentle guide.
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My soul has gained the freedom of the night.
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Of what help is anyone who can only be approached with the right words?
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Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.
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Life more often teaches us how to perfect our weaknesses than how to develop our strengths.
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Those we love are entitled to resent the allowances we make for them.
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To be on a pedestal is to be in a corner.
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What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.
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It is easier to be generous than to be just.
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Each play worth seeing should be watched a second time on the faces of the audience.
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Winter draws what summer paints.
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The image of ourselves in the minds of others is the picture of a stranger we shall never see.
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We learn nothing by being right.
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We are bound to those we love by their imperfections - their perfections help us to explain them to others.
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Our losses should frequently be put on the credit side.
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To regret your sins of commission as much as your sins of omission is to prove yourself a most unworthy sinner.
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Death is part of this life and not of the next.
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I always felt a deep malaise in her - her writing and the fluctuations of her brilliant and esoteic conversation led her everywhere but to self-satisfaction.
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Prince Antoine Bibesco, when asked (by her mother, Margot Asquith) why his wife didn't do more 'good works', such as visiting a hospital, replied, 'Dearest Margot, Elizabeth visits a hospital three times a week, with the result that the lame walk, the blind see, and the dumb would speak if they could get a word in edgeways.'
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Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.
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A brilliant woman whose perpetual wit made my head swim.
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Miss Asquith, who was probably unsurpassed in intelligence by any of her contemporaries ... looked like a lovely figure in an Italian fresco.
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She is pasty and podgy, with the eyes of a currant bun, suddenly protruding with animation.
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The Ten Commandments don't tell you what you ought to do: They only put ideas into your head.
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Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.
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Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality.
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You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.
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Talk about the joys of the unexpected, can they compare with the joys of the expected, of finding everything delightfully and completely what you knew it was going to be?
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Influencing people is dangerous. Their acts and thoughts become your illegitimate children. You can't get away from them and Heaven knows what they mayn't grow up into.
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It is harder to cut our gains than to cut our losses.
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He is invariably in a hurry being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.
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Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.
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We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.
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To some people the impossible is impossible.
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It is harder to cut our gains than our losses.
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Perfect moments don't turn into half-hours.
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It is never good dwelling on good-byes ... it is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.
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Temptations make one very censorious. If you are virtuous you condemn the wicked and if you are wicked, you condemn the virtuous.
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It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.
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Reticences are as revealing as avowals.
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To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.