105 Best Edith Wharton Quotes From The Author Of 'The Age Of Innocence'
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Born in New York, Edith Wharton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who is known all across the world.
Being born into an upper-class society, Edith Wharton used her upbringing to realistically portray the society and is famous for her social commentary on the aristocracy of the time. History was created when Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel 'The Age Of Innocence'.
However, in her personal life, Edith Wharton had to deal with the mental health issues of her husband, Teddy Wharton. When the condition of Teddy Wharton was deemed incurable, Edith Wharton divorced her husband after almost 28 years of marriage.
Yet, all this didn't deter Edith Wharton from being the inspirational and prolific writer that she was. So, without much delay, let us take a look at these quotes by Edith Wharton. We hope you have a good time.
For more quotes like Edith Wharton quotes, take a look at [F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes] and Charlotte Bronte quotes.
Inspiring Quotes From Edith Wharton
Take a look at these quotes by Edith Wharton, the celebrated American author. Quotes include Edith Wharton quotes about light and some literary quotes about happiness.
1. "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
- Edith Wharton, 'Vesalius In Zante'.
2. "True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision."
- Edith Wharton.
3. "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."
- Edith Wharton.
4. "It was part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counselor..."
- Edith Wharton.
5. "Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."
- Edith Wharton.
6. "Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care."
- Edith Wharton
7. "Every dawning talent has to go through a phase of imitation and subjection to influences..."
- Edith Wharton.
8. "Traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy."
Edith Wharton.
9. "They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods."
- Edith Wharton.
10. "The result of every one's being in such a hurry to get everywhere was that nobody could get anywhere."
- Edith Wharton.
11. "Everybody who does anything at all does too much."
- Edith Wharton.
12. "Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them."
- Edith Wharton.
13. "In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert."
- Edith Wharton.
14. "I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings."
- Edith Wharton.
15. "Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board."
- Edith Wharton.
16. "Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
- Edith Wharton.
17. "An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions."
- Edith Wharton.
18. "The only thing to do is to hug one's friends tight and do one's job."
- Edith Wharton.
19. "I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony."
- Edith Wharton.
20. "Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits."
- Edith Wharton.
21. "Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation."
- Edith Wharton.
22. "One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are."
- Edith Wharton.
23. "The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts."
- Edith Wharton.
24. "Life is made up of compromises."
- Edith Wharton.
25. "Oh, the critic who asks for a reprieve has already formed his opinion."
- Edith Wharton.
26. "To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom."
- Edith Wharton.
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."
- Edith Wharton.
28. "The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears."
- Edith Wharton.
29. "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."
- Edith Wharton.
30. "...Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues."
- Edith Wharton.
Famous Edith Wharton Quotes
These are some of the well-known Edith Wharton quotes on marriage and other things from Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
31. "Set wide the window. Let me drink the day."
- Edith Wharton.
32. "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."
- Edith Wharton.
33. "If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time."
- Edith Wharton.
34. "The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."
- Edith Wharton.
35. "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."
- Edith Wharton.
36. "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."
- Edith Wharton.
37. "Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair."
- Edith Wharton.
38. "A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue."
- Edith Wharton.
39. "Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death."
- Edith Wharton.
40. "It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life - and we nearly all manage to dodge it."
- Edith Wharton.
41. "When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble."
- Edith Wharton.
42. "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."
- Edith Wharton.
43. "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.
44. "But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms..."
- Edith Wharton.
45. "Some things are best mended by a break."
- Edith Wharton.
46. "Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions."
- Edith Wharton.
47. "Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins."
- Edith Wharton.
48. "He was a man who grew fat on resentment as others did on happiness."
- Edith Wharton.
49. "If he paid for each day's comfort with the small change of his illusions, he grew daily to value the comfort more and set less store upon the coin."
- Edith Wharton.
50. "Silence may be as variously shaded as speech."
- Edith Wharton.
51. "In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears."
- Edith Wharton.
52. "I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other."
- Edith Wharton.
53. "There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow."
- Edith Wharton.
54. "Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
- Edith Wharton.
55. "My little old dog, a heart-beat at my feet."
- Edith Wharton.
56. "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."
- Edith Wharton.
57. "In our hurried world, too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante."
- Edith Wharton.
58. "I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome."
- Edith Wharton.
59. "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."
- Edith Wharton.
60. "I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction."
- Edith Wharton.
Edith Wharton Quotes From 'The House Of Mirth'
61. "Before Selden left college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it."
- Edith Wharton.
62. "She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate."
- Edith Wharton.
63. "She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making."
- Edith Wharton.
64. "'Don't you ever mind,' she asked suddenly, 'not being rich enough to buy all the books you want'?"
- Edith Wharton.
65. "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.
66. "Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any."
- Edith Wharton.
67. "Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?"
- Edith Wharton.
68. "Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement."
- Edith Wharton.
69. "Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down!"
- Edith Wharton.
70. "We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop."
- Edith Wharton.
71. "Isn't it natural that I should belittle all the things I can't offer you?"
- Edith Wharton.
72. "It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be."
- Edith Wharton.
73. "I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else."
- Edith Wharton.
74. "Vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness."
- Edith Wharton.
75. "Like many unpunctual persons, Mrs. Gormer disliked to be kept waiting."
- Edith Wharton.
76. "It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful."
- Edith Wharton.
77. "Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations?"
- Edith Wharton.
78. "Lost causes had a romantic charm for her..."
- Edith Wharton.
79. "She always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent reaction of prudence."
- Edith Wharton.
80. "It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness."
- Edith Wharton.
81. "No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity."
- Edith Wharton.
82. "It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region."
- Edith Wharton.
83. "I believe she keeps on being queenly in her own room, with the door shut."
- Edith Wharton.
Best Edith Wharton 'Age Of Innocence' Quotes
(Edith Wharton quotes and books are very popular.)
Here are some Edith Wharton quotes from the book that won the Pulitzer Prize.
84. "Each time you happen to me all over again."
- Edith Wharton.
85. "Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there?"
- Edith Wharton.
86. "There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart."
- Edith Wharton.
87. "I can't love you unless I give you up."
- Edith Wharton.
88. "The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"
- Edith Wharton.
89. "We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?"
- Edith Wharton.
90. "In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once."
- Edith Wharton.
91. "'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.
92. "He was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the temperature of passion yet with all its actions."
- Edith Wharton.
93. "She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all."
- Edith Wharton.
94. "The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future."
- Edith Wharton.
95. "You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one."
- Edith Wharton.
96. "It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes."
- Edith Wharton.
97. "The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else."
- Edith Wharton.
98. "The very good people did not convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted."
- Edith Wharton.
99. "And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities."
- Edith Wharton.
100. "The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing."
- Edith Wharton.
101. "He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty."
- Edith Wharton
102. "I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone..."
- Edith Wharton.
103. "Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not."
- Edith Wharton.
104. "It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them."
- Edith Wharton.
105. "Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"
- Edith Wharton.
Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Edith Wharton quotes, then why not take a look at Jay Gatsby quotes or John Steinbeck quotes.
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Bachelor of Arts specializing in English, Master of Arts specializing in English
Rajnandini RoychoudhuryBachelor of Arts specializing in English, Master of Arts specializing in English
With a Master of Arts in English, Rajnandini has pursued her passion for the arts and has become an experienced content writer. She has worked with companies such as Writer's Zone and has had her writing skills recognized by publications such as The Telegraph. Rajnandini is also trilingual and enjoys various hobbies such as music, movies, travel, philanthropy, writing her blog, and reading classic British literature.
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