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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.

Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.

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.

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.