Quotes from Edith Wharton

He went on to praise the company they had just left, declaring that he knew no better way for a young man to form his mind than by frequenting the society of men of conflicting views and equal capacity. "Nothing," said he, "is more injurious to the growth of character than to be secluded from argument and opposition; as nothing is healthier than to be obliged to find good reasons for one's beliefs on pain of surrendering them.

is probable that, like the illustrious author of the drama, all were unconscious of any incongruity between their sentiments and actions.

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

It was his misfortune to be in love with his wife; and this state of mind (in itself sufficiently ridiculous) and the shifts and compromises to which it reduced him, were a source of endless amusement to the humorists.

Every step she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment and the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief.

But that had been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.

she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.

Don't judge us too harshly—or not, at least, till you have taken the trouble to learn our point of view. You consider the individual—we think only of the family.

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm is one of the most inveterate of human instincts." -The Decoration of Houses

If love as a sentiment was the discovery of the medieval poets, love as a moral emotion might be called that of the eighteenth-century philosophers, who, for all their celebration of free unions and fatal passions, were really on the side of the angels, were fighting the battle of the spiritual against the sensual, of conscience against appetite.

The invisible world of thought and conduct had been the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself and the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the old dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment of life. Some day

She could only gather, from the silences and evasions amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up—a woman who was of course dreadful, and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort of shadowy claim upon Arthur. But the claim, whatever it was, had been promptly discredited.