Top 500 Edith Wharton Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Everybody who does anything at all does too much.”

— Edith Wharton

152. “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

153. “To keep a kind of republic of the spirit – that’s what I call success.”

— Edith Wharton

154. “For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.”

— Edith Wharton

155. “It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.”

— Edith Wharton

156. “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

157. “The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed – and pitied.”

— Edith Wharton

158. “The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.”

— Edith Wharton

159. “I am horribly poor – and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money.”

— Edith Wharton

160. “She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.”

— Edith Wharton

161. “In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.”

— Edith Wharton

162. “She’s a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph.”

— Edith Wharton

163. “She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.”

— Edith Wharton

164. “And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.”

— Edith Wharton

165. “The very good people did not convince me; I felt they’d never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands – and you hated the things it asked of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I’d never known before – and it’s better than anything I’ve known.”

— Edith Wharton

166. “I couldn’t have spoken like this yesterday, because when we’ve been apart, and I’m looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you’re so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.”

— Edith Wharton

167. “Once – twice – you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake – I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me – I understood. It was too late for happiness – but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have lived on – don’t take it from me now!”

— Edith Wharton

168. “Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it’s all snowed under.”

— Edith Wharton

169. “The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things... I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call ‘experience.’ But by the time we’ve got that we’re no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.”

— Edith Wharton

170. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.”

— Edith Wharton

171. “Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.”

— Edith Wharton

172. “The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hayfield; but to the left an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white, surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim.”

— Edith Wharton

173. “I’m not much interested in travelling scholarships for women – or in fact in scholarships, tout court! – they’d much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids...”

— Edith Wharton

174. “Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.”

— Edith Wharton

175. “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

176. “The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.”

— Edith Wharton

177. “One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.”

— Edith Wharton

178. “He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.”

— Edith Wharton

179. “There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.”

— Edith Wharton

180. “You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!”

— Edith Wharton

181. “In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an over-mastering longing to be with her again.”

— Edith Wharton

182. “Ah, he would take her beyond – beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of her soul.”

— Edith Wharton

183. “The sudden heat of his tone made her colour mount again, not with a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly across her heart.”

— Edith Wharton

184. “Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.”

— Edith Wharton

185. “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

186. “Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.”

— Edith Wharton

187. “But we’re so different, you know: she likes being good and I like being happy.”

— Edith Wharton

188. “I’d almost say it’s the worries that make married folks sacred to each other...”

— Edith Wharton

189. “Undine’s white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue – and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!”

— Edith Wharton

190. “It’s a hundred years since we’ve met – it may be another hundred before we meet again.”

— Edith Wharton

191. “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in His saints.”

— Edith Wharton

192. “Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of “smart” business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping.”

— Edith Wharton

193. “Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.”

— Edith Wharton

194. “Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.”

— Edith Wharton

195. “The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement – he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations.”

— Edith Wharton

196. “She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.”

— Edith Wharton

197. “Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light.”

— Edith Wharton

198. “Ethan’s love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and “fellows doing things.”

— Edith Wharton

199. “Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need – as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead.”

— Edith Wharton

200. “One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace.”

— Edith Wharton