Edith Wharton

"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."

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

"The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."

"I am not sure that I have ever really known a happy man."

"In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and start a war is to astonish them by exhibiting fission bomb, or especially, to let an ass talk."

"Ah, good friends, I am sure God keeps a special corner in heaven for the wives of artists."

"The really great writers are poets who have happened to be born too late for poetry and too early for the cinema."

"It seems to me that all the things of life depend on some form of routine."

"How much older the works of man look than any of the works of God!"

"Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience will always remain words, clever perhaps and false."

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

"The only way to get rid of an infatuation is to feed it with another."

"Every great age has been an age of belief."

"There is always a 'but' in this world, between the motion and the act."

"Real life is, to most men, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible."

"The daydreamer is a realist."

"Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone."

"Genius is the art of concealing one's sources."

"I wonder if I shall ever feel as well and cheerful as I do at this moment."

"The fastest way to become a writer is to move to Paris."

"Travel, which had once charmed him, has turned into a business."

"In her world, those were things which should be observed."

"Lovers are always reading into conversations what no one else can hear."

"There's no one so bound to you as someone you've helped in his troubles."

"I've always believed in the power of putting words on paper."

"Age and sorrow shut us out from the world."

"Clever women are common and intelligent women are not uncommon."

"The only way to get anything out of life is to work hard."

"Persistence is the beginning of the possible."

"I have no patience with people who laugh in the wrong places."