Edith Wharton Quotes (112 Quotes)


    One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace

    If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty 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

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

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


    The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

    There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.


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

    When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

    A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

    His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.


    I feel that each case must be judged individually, on its own merits ... irrespective of stupid conventionalities... I mean, each woman's right to her liberty.

    I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

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

    Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

    That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

    In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive log past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

    Grace Stepney's mind was like a kind of moral fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn by a fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an inexorable memory.

    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.


    The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.


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

    No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.

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

    She had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.

    Though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him The House of Life. He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffebly tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.

    Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

    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.

    What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

    My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our ''gross public'' to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth

    The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

    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

    The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.

    In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

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

    The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.

    The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

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

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

    I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

    It is the omnipresent rush of water which give the Este Gardens their peculiar character. From the Anio, drawn up the hillside at incalculable cost and labour, a thousand rills gush downward, terrace by terrace, channeling the stone rails of the balusters, leaping from step to step, dripping into mossy conches, flashing in spray from the horns of sea-gods and the jaws of mythical monsters, or forcing themselves in irrepressible overflow down the ivy-matted banks.

    The mere idea of a woman's appealing to her family to screen her husband's business dishonour was inadmisible, since it was the one thing that the Family, as an institution, could not do.

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

    . . . 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.

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

    I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

    Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than was prudent.


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