Edith Wharton Quotes

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

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

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 visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.

Some things are best mended by a break.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

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

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

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

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