Edith Wharton Quotes

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

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

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.

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.

His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.

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.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

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

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

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.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

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

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

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

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

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

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.

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

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