110+ Edith Wharton Quotes On Marriage, Friendship And Luxurious

Edith Wharton was an American author who wrote novels, short stories and poetry. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Age of Innocence. Her works often explored the lives of the aristocracy and the struggles of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Edith Wharton on marriage, love, friendship.

Top 10 Edith Wharton Quotes

1. There are two ways of spreading light: to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
2. There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
3. The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
4. To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
5. One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.
6. The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
7. Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
8. One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
9. 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.
10. In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

Edith Wharton Short Quotes

• A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
• Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
• A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.
• If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
• True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
• Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
• She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
• An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.
• Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
• It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

Edith Wharton Quotes About Marriage

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas. — Edith Wharton

Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all! — Edith Wharton

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

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

But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer — Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton Quotes About Love

Each time you happen to me all over again. — Edith Wharton

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet. — Edith Wharton

The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content. — Edith Wharton

He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied. — Edith Wharton

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day. I loved light ever, light in eye and brain No tapers mirrored in long palace floors, Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles, But just the common dusty wind-blown day That roofs earth's millions. — Edith Wharton

Staunch & faithful little lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love one ever gives them — & it mitigates the pang of losing them to know how very happy a little affection has made them . — Edith Wharton

Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity. — Edith Wharton

Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

I can't love you unless I give you up. — Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton Quotes About Reflects

There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it. — Edith Wharton

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self? — Edith Wharton

...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written. — Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton Quotes About Light

I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light. — Edith Wharton

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate. — Edith Wharton

Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton Quotes About Life

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any. — Edith Wharton

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul. — Edith Wharton

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

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death. — Edith Wharton

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words. — Edith Wharton

They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets. — Edith Wharton

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits. — Edith Wharton

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery. — Edith Wharton

I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer. — Edith Wharton

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? — Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton Quotes About Ways

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. — Edith Wharton

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

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write. — Edith Wharton

Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children. — Edith Wharton

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

To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want. — Edith Wharton

there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine. — Edith Wharton

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them. — Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone. — Edith Wharton

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

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? — Edith Wharton

There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

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

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

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

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit — Edith Wharton

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

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers. — Edith Wharton

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

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. — Edith Wharton

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow. — Edith Wharton

She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision. — Edith Wharton

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

Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care. — Edith Wharton

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. — Edith Wharton

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one. — Edith Wharton

... naturalness is not always consonant with taste. — Edith Wharton

... caprice is as ruinous as routine. — Edith Wharton

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought. — Edith Wharton

The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring. — Edith Wharton

Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

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

The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. — Edith Wharton

Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. — Edith Wharton

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background. — Edith Wharton

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom. — Edith Wharton

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

The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order. — Edith Wharton

I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them. — Edith Wharton

...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert. — Edith Wharton

... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain. — Edith Wharton

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

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

Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'. — Edith Wharton

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

Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves? — Edith Wharton

I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession. — Edith Wharton

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.” — Edith Wharton

In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time. — Edith Wharton

She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life. — Edith Wharton

Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them. — Edith Wharton

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

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. — Edith Wharton

Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them. — Edith Wharton

Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves. — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank; but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family. — Edith Wharton

We ought to be opening a bottle of wine! — Edith Wharton

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

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. 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

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading. — Edith Wharton

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears. — Edith Wharton

He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty. — Edith Wharton

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

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep — Edith Wharton

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. — Edith Wharton

Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose. — Edith Wharton

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair. — Edith Wharton

One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written. — Edith Wharton

Life Lessons by Edith Wharton

1. Edith Wharton emphasizes the importance of resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity, showing that life is full of obstacles and that it is essential to remain determined and focused on one's goals.
2. She also emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and introspection, encouraging readers to take time to consider their actions and choices in order to gain insight into their lives.
3. Lastly, Wharton encourages readers to be kind and generous to others, emphasizing the importance of empathy and understanding in order to build meaningful relationships.