A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
– Edith Wharton
A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
– Edith Wharton
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
– Edith Wharton
Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
– Edith Wharton
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
– Edith Wharton
How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
– Edith Wharton
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
– Edith Wharton
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
– Edith Wharton
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive log 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.
– Edith Wharton
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
– Edith Wharton
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
– Edith Wharton
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
– 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.
– Edith Wharton
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
– Edith Wharton
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
– Edith Wharton
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
– Edith Wharton
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
– Edith Wharton
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.
– Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
– Edith Wharton
There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
– Edith Wharton
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.