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"She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference - and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable."
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"It isn't so much life's problems that challenge us but the emotional turbulence stirred up while trying to deal with them. People possessing the gift of emotional detachment are lucky in that their personal problems seem far less problematic."

"People are going to break promises, and they will have every right to till the point you realize that you don't change plans based on someone else's words."

"All that is great cannot be possessed - and that is one of the most foolish things man goes on doing."

"Don't participate or allow yourself to be dragged into other people's dramas, complaints, or gossip."

"I never have been involved in politics."

"Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth."

"Having less worries is what allows me to talk to beggars in the street or tell jokes at waitresses and try to make them smile. I couldn't do that before, when I had a job and was always worried about money."

"Sometimes the best solution is to stop trying to change people."

"Vitarags [the enlightened one] do not have a desire for giving or receiving charity. They are in the state of 'shuddh upyog' [pure awareness of pure soul]."

"One binds the worldly life with bad thoughts, one binds the worldly life with good thoughts. With the absence of thoughts (avichaar) there is moksha [liberation]."
Explore more quotes by Edith Wharton

"She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."

"What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest."

"Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them-children, duties, visits, bores, relations-the things that protect married people from each other. We've been too close together-that has been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of each other's souls."

"When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say."

"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."

"Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites."

"If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it."
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