Edith Wharton Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“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