661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins?

Archer disliked her use of the word “clever” almost as much as her use of the word “common”; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of view had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible. Until a few months ago he had never known a “nice” woman who looked at life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity – their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.

Of course he’s good-he’s too stupid to be bad.

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.

There’s nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?