Top 30 Elsie De Wolfe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am going to make everything around me beautiful – that will be my life.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

Featured in: Sweet Quotes, Happy Quotes, Optimism Quotes, Joy Quotes, Beauty Quotes

2. “Be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, but be gracious if it kills you.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

3. “Simplicity, suitability and proportion.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes

4. “You will soon find that your joy in your home is growing, and that you have a source of happiness within yourself that you had not suspected.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

5. “What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes with it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it- and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

6. “You can’t take it with you. There are no pockets in a shroud.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

7. “Eating outdoors makes for good health and long life and good temper, everyone knows that.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

8. “We cannot do better than to accept the standards of other times, and to adapt them to our uses.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

9. “The cardinal virtue of all beauty is restraint.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

10. “I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

11. “I can’t paint. I can’t write. I can’t sing. But I can decorate and run a house, and light it, and heat it, and have it like a living thing.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

12. “I am going in now for interior decoration. By that I mean supplying objets d’art and giving advice regarding the decoration of their houses to wealthy persons who do not have the time, inclination, nor culture to do such work for themselves. It is nothing new. Women have done the same thing before.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

13. “No one chair should be isolated...”

— Elsie De Wolfe

14. “My business is to preach to you the beauty of suitability.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

15. “I was not ugly. I might never be anything for men to lose their heads about, but I need never again be ugly. This knowledge was like a song within me. Suddenly it all came together. If you were healthy, fit, and well-dressed, you could be attractive.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

16. “You will express yourself in your house whether you want to or not.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

17. “I opened the doors and windows of America, and let the air and sunshine in.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

18. “It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

19. “No, I don’t take soup. You can’t build a meal on a lake.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

20. “There never has been a house so bad that it couldn’t be made over into something worthwhile.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

21. “I was born with the courage to live. Only those are unwise who have never dared to be fools.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

22. “Never, under any circumstance, do I touch soup, as I do not believe in building a meal on a lake.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

23. “It is not chic to be too chic.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

24. “When one begins to think of oneself as growing old, one is already old.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

25. “Good dressing is largely a question of detail and accessories.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

26. “I know of nothing more significant than the awakening of men and women throughout our country to the desire to improve their houses. Call it what you will – awakening, development, American Renaissance – it is a most startling and promising condition of affairs.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

27. “It does not matter whether one paints a picture, writes a poem, or carves a statue – simplicity is the mark of a master-hand...”

— Elsie De Wolfe

28. “Light, air and comfort – these three things I must always have in a room...”

— Elsie De Wolfe

29. “A house should be a synthesis of comfort, practicality, and tradition.”

— Elsie De Wolfe

30. “To conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one’s taxes or to write according to the rule of grammar.”

— Elsie De Wolfe