Edith Wharton Quotes

I don't mind being ridiculed - well, I guess I would mind a little, but it would only last a few minutes - it's all very ephemeral; it doesn't really matter what people think of me.

I just wish insignificance had more stature.

Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.

Our self-love is mortified, when we think our opinions, and even our tastes, customs, and dresses, either arraigned or condemned;as, on the contrary, it is tickled and flattered by approbation.

For my writing, and because I love talking to young women about life, I often asked them which would they rather have - a father in the house with them while growing up or a big butt? I tell you 86 percent of the time, girls say a big butt because it gets them further.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

I thought that being popular in school was just so pathetic. I knew I had a future over and beyond the horizon of that school.

If you're a kid who's not necessarily attractive, and you don't have money, and you're not hip and cool, chances are you're not going to feel good about yourself and want to be an actor.

It's actually come as quite a shock to learn just how many people don't like me.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

I still need the camera because it is the only reason anyone is talking to me.

The funny thing is, I'm so used to not caring what anyone says, good or bad, that unfortunately even when people say good things... I wish it made me feel good, but it doesn't.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

I always had good friends, but I did not feel like a cool girl, ever.

I never wanted to be liked by the majority of people, but there were always some people that I desperately wanted to be liked by. And so you've got to behave in a way that... the way I put it is that if you want to be a real intellectual, you've got to have someone to save you.

It doesn't really matter to me how people see me.

I'm not a walking fleet of vanity vans any more than I'm a walking, talking multi-star cast. I might want an entourage, but so far, it is entirely eluding me.

If people don't like you, people don't like you. It's as simple as that.

I am not a beauty queen, and I was not the popular girl in high school.

When you're the cool guy, you don't know how to take people not liking you. I've already been there, done that.

Do I feel underrated? Yes. Does that bother me? No, not really.

Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.

I don't understand how people can stand next to you one year,and next year, they cannot. They're going crazy, screaming. They can't take it that you're there. But last year I was in the same club,walking around,lonely like a motherfucker. Couldn't get a date or a dance. I was too skinny, too something, and now, "He's just adorable. He's just, oh!

The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.

What renders other people's vanity insufferable is that it wounds our own.