Princess Alice Quotes

“It takes a few years for a nature which thirsts for strong mutual love and intellectual communion to reach the point of cheerfully and contentedly renouncing what it seeks. I must reach that point, and if God wills, I shall reach it. The more one's own self dies, the more one can be to others, and, renouncing one's own personal desires, live in search of something higher and better.

[Princess Alice, in a letter to her husband Prince Louis, 5 August 1877]”
― Gerard Noel, Princess Alice: Queen Victoria's Forgotten Daughter

“I could have been quite happy and contented living in a cottage, if I had been able to share my intellectual interests, and intellectual aspirations with a husband whose strong, protective love would have guided me round the rocks strewn in my way by my own nature, outward circumstances, and the excesses of my own opinions.

[Princess Alice, in a letter to her husband Prince Louis, 3 October 1876]”
― Gerard Noel, Princess Alice: Queen Victoria's Forgotten Daughter

“People with strong feelings and of nervous temperament, for which one is no more responsible than for the colour of one's eyes, have things to fight against and to put up with, unknown to those of quiet equable dispositions, who are free from violent emotions, and have consequently no feeling of nerves -- still less, of irritable nerves. If I did not control mine they would be dreadful....One can overcome a great deal -- but -alter- one's self one cannot....

[Princess Alice, in a letter dated 24 September 1874]”
― Gerard Noel, Princess Alice: Queen Victoria's Forgotten Daughter

“The whole edifice of philosophical conclusions which I had built for myself, I find to have no foundation whatever; nothing of it is left, it has crumbled away like dust. What should we be? What would become of us if we did not believe that there is a God who rules the world and each one of us?

[Princess Alice, in the aftermath of the 1873 death of her two-year-old son Friedrich (Frittie)]”
― Gerard Noel, Princess Alice: Queen Victoria's Forgotten Daughter

“Each year brings us nearer to the Wiedersehen [reunion with the dead], though it is sad to think how one's glass is running out and how little good goes with it, compared to the numberless blessings we receive. Time goes incredibly fast.

[Princess Alice, letter to her mother Queen Victoria, 30 December 1865]”
― Gerard Noel, Princess Alice: Queen Victoria's Forgotten Daughter

“Life is indeed but a short journey, on which we have our duty to do, and in which joy and sorrow alternatively prevail.

[Princess Alice, letter to her mother Queen Victoria, 21 April 1865]”
― Gerard Noel, Princess Alice: Queen Victoria's Forgotten Daughter