Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

— Edith Wharton

Featured in: Positive Quotes

2. “Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”

— Edith Wharton

3. “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

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

— Edith Wharton

5. “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

6. “Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.”

— Edith Wharton

7. “My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet.”

— Edith Wharton

8. “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

9. “How I hate everything!”

— Edith Wharton

10. “Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.”

— Edith Wharton

11. “Each time you happen to me all over again.”

— Edith Wharton

12. “Some things are best mended by a break.”

— Edith Wharton

13. “Life is made up of compromises.”

— Edith Wharton

14. “To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.”

— Edith Wharton

15. “It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.”

— Edith Wharton

16. “Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.”

— Edith Wharton

17. “Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.”

— Edith Wharton

18. “It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.”

— Edith Wharton

19. “If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.”

— Edith Wharton

20. “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”

— Edith Wharton

21. “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

22. “Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.”

— Edith Wharton

23. “Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn’t any.”

— Edith Wharton

24. “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.”

— Edith Wharton

25. “Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?”

— Edith Wharton

26. “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

27. “In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.”

— Edith Wharton

28. “To know when to be generous and when firm – that is wisdom.”

— Edith Wharton

29. “When a man says he doesn’t understand a woman it’s because he won’t take the trouble.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

31. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

32. “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

33. “We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!”

— Edith Wharton

34. “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

35. “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.”

— Edith Wharton

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “I’m afraid I’m an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.”

— Edith Wharton

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

— Edith Wharton

38. “And you’ll sit beside me, and we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities.”

— Edith Wharton

39. “He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.”

— Edith Wharton

40. “I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.”

— Edith Wharton

41. “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

42. “In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.”

— Edith Wharton

43. “You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute.”

— Edith Wharton

44. “I can’t love you unless I give you up.”

— Edith Wharton

45. “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

46. “The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.”

— Edith Wharton

47. “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

48. “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

49. “A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.”

— Edith Wharton

50. “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