Edith Wharton Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Each time you happen to me all over again. The Age of Innocence

2. Her failure was a useful preliminary to success. The Custom of the Country

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

4. It had evidently not occurred to her as yet that those who consent to share the bread of adversity may want the whole cake of prosperity for themselves. The Glimpses of the Moon

5. 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. Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction

6. 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, the very meaning of one's soul.

7. They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods. Ethan Frome

8. To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

9. 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

10. High PastureCome up--come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breezeHas stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,Night is not, autumn is not--but the flowOf vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,Poured from the far world's flaming boundariesIn waxing tides of unimagined glow.And to that height illumined of the mindhe calls us still by the familiar way,Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay--Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,How on the heights is day and still more day.

11. One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop. The House of Mirth