Princess Elizabeth (Asquith) Bibesco (February 26, 1897 - April 7, 1945)

English writer

Attributed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Winter draws what summer paints.

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

• We learn nothing by being right.

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

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

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

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

Quotes about Elizabeth Bibesco

• 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."

• 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. Elizabeth Bowen

• 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. S.N. Behrman

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

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

• A brilliant woman whose perpetual wit made my head swim. David Low