Edith Wharton Quotes

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.

One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.

If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

Each time you happen to me all over again.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods

There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.

She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.