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

Edith Wharton

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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
Useful
Obligation
Art
Beautiful
Firsts
First
Make
Things
Obligations

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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
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I can't love you unless I give you up.
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I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.
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What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
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And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.
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She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies.
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Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
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Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
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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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Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
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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.
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She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
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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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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.
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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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Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
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The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
Edith Wharton
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In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
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... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
Edith Wharton