661 Quotes by Edith Wharton

To keep a kind of republic of the spirit – that’s what I call success.

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?

Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.

But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the spar which should float them to safety.

Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

The very good people did not convince me; I felt they’d never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands – and you hated the things it asked of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I’d never known before – and it’s better than anything I’ve known.

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.

If we'd only stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.