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

—Edith Wharton

About Edith Wharton

Portrait of Edith Wharton

Edith Newbold Wharton (; née Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of upper-class New York society to portray, realistically, the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win...

More quotations from Edith Wharton

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

—Edith Wharton

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

—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

pain marriage misery

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

More quotations tagged with “trying”

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

—G. K. Chesterton

desire trying Christian

I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God's.

—Lyndon B. Johnson

God help trying

You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine.

winning effort trying taking a chance

For no reason I can explain, I began to discover how little it mattered where you are or what anyone does to you. I was sure that what I had done to get there [imprisoned for draft resistance] was right, and somehow the longer I was there, the better I felt.… I felt filled with love for everyone: everyone I knew and everyone I didn't know; for plants, fish, animals; even bankers, generals, prison guards, and lying politicians—everything and everyone. Why did I feel so good? Was it God? Or approaching death? Or just the way life is supposed to be if we weren't so busy trying to make it something else?

—David Dellinger

love God good death prison trying resistance

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

success trouble trying stupidity

History

19 Jun 2017 Added