Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Edith Wharton
Age: 75 †
Born: 1862
Born: January 24
Died: 1937
Died: August 11
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
Edith Newbold Jones
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton
Pretty
Stop
Happiness
Happy
Women
Trying
Good
Time
Memorable
More quotes by Edith Wharton
The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.
Edith Wharton
Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!
Edith Wharton
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.
Edith Wharton
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
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
But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
Edith Wharton
Life is always either a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
Edith Wharton
The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
Edith Wharton
traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
Edith Wharton
I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.
Edith Wharton
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
Edith Wharton
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Edith Wharton
She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
Edith Wharton
... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.
Edith Wharton
One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
Edith Wharton
Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
Edith Wharton
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
Edith Wharton
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
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
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
Edith Wharton