Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Hope, our collection of Edith Wharton Quotes will inspire you to live a happy life.
Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.
– Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton Quotes
1. “If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.” – Edith Wharton
2. “Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.” – Edith Wharton
3. “True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.” – Edith Wharton
4. “Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.” – Edith Wharton
5. “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
6. “The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.” – Edith Wharton
7. “The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.” – Edith Wharton
8. “Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.” – Edith Wharton
9. “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
10. “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.” – Edith Wharton
11. “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” – Edith Wharton
12. “Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn’t any.” – Edith Wharton
13. “What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.” – Edith Wharton
14. “One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.” – Edith Wharton
15. “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
16. “Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.” – Edith Wharton
17. “A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.” – Edith Wharton
18. “To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.” – Edith Wharton
19. “Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.” – Edith Wharton
20. “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
21. “Traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.” – Edith Wharton
22. “Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.” – Edith Wharton
23. “In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.” – Edith Wharton
24. “Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.” – Edith Wharton
25. “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
26. “Life is made up of compromises.” – Edith Wharton
27. “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
28. “Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.” – Edith Wharton
29. “An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.” – Edith Wharton
30. “The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.” – Edith Wharton
31. “There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.” – Edith Wharton
32. “Every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.” – Edith Wharton
33. “Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.” – Edith Wharton
34. “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
35. “In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.” – Edith Wharton
36. “Everybody who does anything at all does too much.” – Edith Wharton
37. “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
38. “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
39. “Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?” – Edith Wharton
40. “Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.” – Edith Wharton
