Edith Wharton famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Life #Positive

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

#Real #Loneliness #People

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

#Inspirational #Travel #People

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Discovery #Irritated #Consequence

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

#Education #Men #Interesting

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

#Pain #Healing #Compassion

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

#New York #Divorce #Diploma

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?
-- Edith Wharton

#Life #People #Novel

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

#Happiness #Butterfly #Winter

Each time you happen to me all over again.
-- Edith Wharton

#Love #Romantic #Being In Love

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

#Life And Death #Intellectual #Curiosity

There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.
-- Edith Wharton

#Happiness #Mirrors #Light

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

#Fate #Destiny #Men

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Soul #Acres #March

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
-- Edith Wharton

#Achievement #Way #Ruins

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Definitions #Beloved #Classic

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#May #Architecture #Sanity

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Doors #Drawing #House

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
-- Edith Wharton

#Beautiful #Eye #Thinking

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

#Vanity #Weight #Nests

Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.
-- Edith Wharton

#May

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

#Dramatic #Significance #Frivolity

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?
-- Edith Wharton

#Mean #Ideas #Illusion

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. Edith Wharton ~ The Touchstone
-- Edith Wharton

#Hate #Self Esteem #Eye

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

#Criticism #Glitter #Weak

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.
-- Edith Wharton

#Love #Dog #Animal

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.
-- Edith Wharton

#Silence #May #Speech

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

#Art #Fear #Immature

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
-- Edith Wharton

#Life #Giving #Literature

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
-- Edith Wharton

#Vision #Literature #Originality

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
-- Edith Wharton

#Inspiring #Air #Breathing

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

#Inspiring #Mother #Sin

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

#Money #Thinking #Way

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

#Half #Life Is #Trouble

The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job.
-- Edith Wharton

#Friendship #Jobs #Hug

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Music #Artist #Italian

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
-- Edith Wharton

#Women #Hair #Doe

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Believe #Vanity #Self

They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
-- Edith Wharton

#Groups #Puppets #Gestures

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
-- Edith Wharton

#Action #Window #Drink

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

#Breakfast #Bananas #Shame

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

#Tears #Enough #Subjects

What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.
-- Edith Wharton

#Happiness #Fate #Thinking

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.
-- Edith Wharton

#Happiness #World #Littles

Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
-- Edith Wharton

#Air #Breathing #Ideas

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Hands #Sick #Care

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.
-- Edith Wharton

#Silence #Lasts #Bed

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Real #Keys #Two

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Friendship #Best Friend #Self

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.
-- Edith Wharton

#Children #Thinking #Two

The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.
-- Edith Wharton

#Stories #May #Moral

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.
-- Edith Wharton

#Eye #Thinking #Animal

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.
-- Edith Wharton

#Art #Stupid #Eye