Quotes by Edith Wharton

• What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
• The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
• The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
• The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
• The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
• 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.
• There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
• True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
• 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.
• Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.
• If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
• To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
• Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
• A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
• After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
• Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
• Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
• Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
• 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.
• He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
• I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.
• I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
• 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.
• In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
• Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
• Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
• My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.
• There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it