Beatrix Potter quotes

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.
- Beatrix Potter

We cannot stay home all our lives, we must present ourselves to the world and we must look upon it as an adventure.
- Beatrix Potter

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.
- Beatrix Potter

What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?
- Beatrix Potter

I have just made stories to please myself, because I never grew up.
- Beatrix Potter

All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.
- Beatrix Potter

With opportunity the world is very interesting.
- Beatrix Potter

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
- Beatrix Potter

What we call the highest and the lowest in nature are both equally perfect. A willow bush is as beautiful as the human form divine.
- Beatrix Potter

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.
- Beatrix Potter

For quiet, solitary and observant children create their own world and live in it, nourishing their imaginations on the material at hand.
- Beatrix Potter

I do so hate finishing books. I would like to go on with them for years.
- Beatrix Potter

I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.
- Beatrix Potter

I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense...
- Beatrix Potter

Sunday, January 27, 1884. -- There was another story in the paper a week or so since. A gentleman had a favourite cat whom he taught to sit at the dinner table where it behaved very well. He was in the habit of putting any scraps he left onto the cat's plate. One day puss did not take his place punctually, but presently appeared with two mice, one of which it placed on its master's plate, the other on its own.
- Beatrix Potter

Most people, after one success, are so cringingly afraid of doing less well that they rub all the edge off their subsequent work.
- Beatrix Potter

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.
- Beatrix Potter

I hold an old-fashioned notion that a happy marriage is the crown of a woman’s life.
- Beatrix Potter

Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.
- Beatrix Potter

The shorter and the plainer the better.
- Beatrix Potter