661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

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.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.