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
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. – 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
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