They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods. – Edith Wharton
There are moments when a mans imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny. – Edith Wharton
People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead. – Edith Wharton
There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries. – Edith Wharton
And to my thinking as a lover of life, butterflies, soap-bubbles, and whatever is of their kind among men, know most of happiness. To see these light, foolish, delicate, mobile little souls flitting about—that moveth Zarathustra to tears and to song. – Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), “Of Reading and Writing,” Thus Spake Zarathus