49 Edith Wharton Quotes

Edith Wharton quotes

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

2. It was part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counselor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.

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

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

5. After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others that (one is fairly sure) don't exist - or exist in a less measure.

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

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

8. How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be 'American' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

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

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

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. I can't love you unless I give you up.

15. In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.

16. It was the old New York way of taking life 'without effusion of blood': the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.

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

18. 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.

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

20. In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long 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.

21. I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

22. To [Henry] James's intimates, however, these elaborate hesitancies, far from being an obstacle, were like a cobweb bridge flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one's feet.

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

24. Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

25. 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.

26. Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

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

1. Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.

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

3. With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

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

5. 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.

6. Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

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

8. In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

9. Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will.

10. Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.

11. The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

12. Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

13. She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.

14. 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 ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

15. I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other.

16. 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.

17. I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.

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

19. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

20. Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.

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

22. Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.