40 Princess Elizabeth Bibesco Quotes

Princess Elizabeth Bibesco quotes

1. My soul has gained the freedom of the night.

2. Of what help is anyone who can only be approached with the right words?

3. Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.

4. Life more often teaches us how to perfect our weaknesses than how to develop our strengths.

   Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

5. Those we love are entitled to resent the allowances we make for them.

6. To be on a pedestal is to be in a corner.

7. What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.

8. It is easier to be generous than to be just.

9. Each play worth seeing should be watched a second time on the faces of the audience.

10. Winter draws what summer paints.

11. The image of ourselves in the minds of others is the picture of a stranger we shall never see.

12. We learn nothing by being right.

13. We are bound to those we love by their imperfections - their perfections help us to explain them to others.

14. Our losses should frequently be put on the credit side.

15. To regret your sins of commission as much as your sins of omission is to prove yourself a most unworthy sinner.

16. Death is part of this life and not of the next.

17. 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.

18. 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.'

19. 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.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

20. A brilliant woman whose perpetual wit made my head swim.

21. Miss Asquith, who was probably unsurpassed in intelligence by any of her contemporaries ... looked like a lovely figure in an Italian fresco.

22. She is pasty and podgy, with the eyes of a currant bun, suddenly protruding with animation.

1. The Ten Commandments don't tell you what you ought to do: They only put ideas into your head.

2. Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.

3. Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality.

4. 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.

5. 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?

6. 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.

7. It is harder to cut our gains than to cut our losses.

8. He is invariably in a hurry being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.

9. Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

10. We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.

11. To some people the impossible is impossible.

12. It is harder to cut our gains than our losses.

13. Perfect moments don't turn into half-hours.

14. It is never good dwelling on good-byes ... it is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.

15. Temptations make one very censorious. If you are virtuous you condemn the wicked and if you are wicked, you condemn the virtuous.

16. It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.

17. Reticences are as revealing as avowals.

18. To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.