Elizabeth Bibesco quotes:

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

What you possess is not what you jingle in the pockets of your memory, but the imaginings with which you fill the spaces of the future.

I do not know at what moment in life, if ever, we realise that we are neither George Sands nor Juliets. Of course, if we are not beautiful, we recognise early that beauty is nothing.

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

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.

The only thing that matters is to have charm and expression. Then comes that horrible gnawing doubt of our own magnetism. Is it possible that, though we are not lovely, we are not irresistible either? That we will have to go through life belonging neither to the triumphantly beautiful nor to the triumphantly ugly?

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

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

All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.

Isn't that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?

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.

Free love is sometimes love but never freedom.

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.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

It is better not to sit on the grass after thirty when sprawling at all is difficult, let alone sprawling gracefully.

Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing - eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.

There is nothing in the world like health. Live cleanly, and the high thinking will look after itself - or at least won't matter. Physical condition - there's nothing like it.

There is something very independent about French balloons - you feel you couldn't make a pet of one.

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

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.

What an uncertain thing, marriage - what an elusive thing, happiness!

A man who is available for lunch, has no wife, is interested in everything, and talks well is socially invaluable.

Passion is no respecter of persons. She hardly seems to select her victims.

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

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?

Reticences are as revealing as avowals.

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

To some people the impossible is impossible.

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

Happiness is the moment when you cease to make an inventory of joys; it is a glow, a brightness - never a list ...

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

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

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

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

My soul has gained the freedom of the night

Perfect moments don't turn into half-hours.

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

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

Are there any punishments in life but our joys turned against us?

It is harder to cut our gains than our losses.

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

We learn nothing by being right.