"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
"Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon."
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Source: Edith Wharton (2014). “Edith Wharton The Dover Reader”, p.328, Courier Corporation
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