Top 100 Edith Quotes
#1. Newland never seems to look ahead,' Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely:
'No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.
Edith Wharton
#2. Money? How did I lose it? I never did lose it. I just never knew where it went.
Edith Piaf
#3. Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But,
Edith Wharton
#4. The teeth on [the viperfish] are so long that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish, it would actually impale its own brain.
Edith Widder
#5. They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
Edith Wharton
#7. We were sent to the Judengottesdienst, the children's service at the synagogue on Saturday afternoons. The maid was supposed to take us. But she was a Catholic, like most Austrians, and she feared the synagogue; and my mother - a working woman, dependent on her help - feared the maid.
Edith Hahn Beer
#8. Berta, whose boyfriend had walked so far to see her, went out without her star and was immediately arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
Edith Hahn Beer
#10. A man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fit for, even if there's time for both.
Edith Wharton
#11. She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
Edith Wharton
#14. I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
Edith Wharton
#15. Here.
After so long waiting.
Her purple eyes.
Torn cloak.
Skin pale, sheer as ice.
Exhausted.
But unafraid.
Edith Pattou
#16. Among all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing almost everything better than they did.
Edith Wharton
#17. A pine needle fell in the forest. The hawk saw it. The deer heard it. The white bear smelled it
Edith Pattou
#18. The easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind.
Edith Hamilton
#19. Though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little.
Edith Hamilton
#20. She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
Edith Wharton
#21. There are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
Edith Wharton
#22. Someday, somehow, I am going to do something useful, something for people. They are, most of them, so helpless, so hurt and so unhappy.
Edith Cavell
#23. Many faux pas of fashion can be avoided if you curb your instinctive desire to buy things with your heart instead of your head.
Edith Head
#24. I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy
Edith Wharton
#25. In order to be an image of God, the spirit must turn to what is eternal, hold it in spirit, keep it in memory, and by loving it, embrace it in the will.
Edith Stein
#26. I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.
Edith Sitwell
#27. You can't imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man's not telling her that he loves her - pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them!
Edith Wharton
#28. The spirit of the year, like bacchant crowned, With lighted torch goes careless on his way; And soon bursts into flame the maple's spray, And vines are running fire along the ground.
Edith M. Thomas
#29. And he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes
Edith Wharton
#30. An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.
Edith Wharton
#31. I want to die young. I think it's awful to get old, and sickness is ugly ...
Edith Piaf
#32. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.
Edith Hamilton
#33. Cowardly thoughts, anxious hesitation, Womanish timidity, timorous complaints Won't keep misery away from you And will not set you free.
Edith Hahn Beer
#34. If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
#35. Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do?
Edith Schaeffer
#36. The cardinal sin is not being badly dressed, but wearing the right thing in the wrong place.
Edith Head
#37. I am slow. A sentence often takes an hour to compose before I throw it out. What can you do?
Edith Pearlman
#38. He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
Edith Wharton
#39. What a costume designer does is a cross between magic and camouflage. We create the illusion of changing the actors into what they are not. We ask the public to believe that every time they see a performer on the screen, he's become a different person.
Edith Head
#40. She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
Edith Wharton
#41. Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.
Edith Hamilton
#42. Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.
Edith Wharton
#43. Winter is the time for comfort - it is the time for home.
Edith Sitwell
#44. Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Edith Sitwell
#45. Just imagine dressing the two handsomest men in the world, and then getting this!
Edith Head
#46. Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
Edith Wharton
#47. It is not hard work that is dreary; it is superficial work.
Edith Hamilton
#48. The thing about real life is that important events don't announce themselves ... Usually something that is going to change your whole life is a memory before you can stop and be impressed about it.
Edith Schaeffer
#49. My longing for truth was a single prayer.
Edith Stein
#50. My self-confidence comes from the fact that I have discovered my own dimensions. It does not behoove me to make myself smaller than I am.
Edith Sodergran
#51. And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.
Edith Wharton
#52. I can't imagine going on when there are no more expectations.
Edith Evans
#53. Put into words by this selfish, well-fed, and supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.
Edith Wharton
#54. Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.
Edith Wharton
#55. How beautiful it was
and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.
Edith Wharton
#56. The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves ...
Edith Sitwell
#57. 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
#58. Growing old gracefully used to begin at about 35, but today women prefer to 'stay young gratefully' with thanks to designers, beauticians and plastic surgeons.
Edith Head
#59. It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.
Edith Beale
#60. 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.
Edith Wharton
#61. The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation they do not want to attract attention.
Edith Sitwell
#62. I don't think there's any point in meeting anybody who doesn't like music.
Edith Bouvier Beale
#63. He remembered once hearing his grandmother ... say plaintively: Why daughter, I presume I can go without
BUT I CAN'T ECONOMIZE.
Edith Wharton
#64. Her soul opened slowly and timidly to her kind, but her imagination rushed out to the beauties of the visible world; and the decaying majesty of Allfriars moved her strangely.
Edith Wharton
#65. There is no demand for women engineers, as such, as there are for women doctors; but there's always a demand for anyone who can do a good piece of work.
Edith Clarke
#66. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
Edith Wharton
#67. Even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton
#68. Clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.
Edith Hamilton
#69. I think you have to pay for love with bitter tears.
Edith Piaf
#70. I crossed the room to him. "I love you," I said in a rush, afraid I would change my mind.
"Charles," he replied.
Edith Pattou
#71. A man has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of view, and before Selden left for college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it.
Edith Wharton
#72. The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm is one of the most inveterate of human instincts. -The Decoration of Houses
Edith Wharton
#73. Children are meant to understand compassion and comfort because they have received compassion and comfort - and this should be in the family setting. A family should be a place where comfort is experienced and understood, so that the people are prepared to give comfort to others.
Edith Schaeffer
#74. Staunch and faithful lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love that one ever gives them.
Edith Wharton
#75. I live by Edith Wharton's rule to get rid of anything neither useful nor beautiful. So I put the TV out on the street.
Melissa Bank
#76. Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
#77. Bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate ... happens to me on a daily basis!
Edith Wharton
#78. That's all it takes, you see
a moment of kindness. Someone who is sweet and understanding, who seems to be sent there like an angel on the road to get you through the nightmare.
Edith Hahn Beer
#79. Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing "Non, je ne regrette rien" - which is more often than I'd like, now that I'm at university - I can't help thinking, What the hell is she talking about? I regret pretty much everything.
David Nicholls
#80. None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.
Edith Hamilton
#81. Meanwhile everything matters - that concerns you.
Edith Wharton
#83. Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.
Edith Wharton
#84. To begin with, I hate these new-fangled intermediate meals. Why can't people eat enough at luncheon to last till dinner?
Edith Wharton
#85. Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity ...
Edith Sitwell
#86. I've been thinking about Jesus. Don't you find it a bit strange that, since He was living with His family and all, He up and left them just when they needed him most?
Edith Piaf
#87. I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.
Edith Wharton
#88. [Marriage] promote[s] the moral order of the world - Edith Wharton "The Eyes
S.T. Joshi
#89. Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.
Edith Hamilton
#90. I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
Edith Sitwell
#91. Women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.
Edith Wharton
#92. I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.'
Ken Follett
#93. The joy I feel is immense; it burns inside me as though I have swallowed a piece of the sun.
Edith Pattou
#95. Who can sleep on the night that God became man?
Edith Stein
#96. Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints
Edith Sitwell
#97. But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.
Edith Wharton
#98. The sense of the wonder of human life, its beauty and terror and pain, and the power in men to do and to hear, is in Aeschylus and in Shakespeare as in no other writer. Thy
Edith Hamilton
#99. All ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.
Edith Sitwell
#100. If Grandma Goldman ever smiled, she must have done it in the bathroom with the door locked. She had been the undisputed head of her own family, ruling with an iron hand and a mouth full of rocks.
Edith Konecky
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