Edith Wharton Quotes
"The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Ideas, Worth)
"The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: American, Mind)
"The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Money)
"The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Duty)
"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."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Imagination, Destiny, Man, Moments)
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
- Edith Wharton
"True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Vision, Originality)
"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."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Time, People)
"Silence may be as variously shaded as speech."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: May, Silence, Speech)
"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Time, Pretty, Trying)
"To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?"
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Life, Living, Worth)
"Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Mother)
"A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Virtue, Divorce)
"After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others."
- Edith Wharton
"Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Life, Bed)
"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Art)
"Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Age, Death, Freedom, Old, Universe)
"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."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Habit, Habits)
"He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Memories)
"I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Life, Care, Man, Want)
"I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Time, People)
"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."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Being)
"In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Deep, Tears)
"Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Experience, Life, Wisdom)
"Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Misfortune)
"My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Feet)