Edith Wharton Quotes - Page 2

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

I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.

... caprice is as ruinous as routine.

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

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

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

Each time you happen to me all over again.

They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.

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

traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

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

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.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Life is made up of compromises.

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

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

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.

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

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