"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
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Quote collection
Edith Wharton quotes (page 1 of 13)
254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts."
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"I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast."
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"To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines."
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"One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways."
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"If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time."
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"The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"
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"There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries."
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"Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions."
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"But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."
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"One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are."
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"Set wide the window. Let me drink the day."
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"Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope."
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"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."
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"Each time you happen to me all over again."
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"In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs."
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"I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone."
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"Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any."
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"The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. 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."
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"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."
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