Elsie de Wolfe
I am going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life.Collection: Change
You will express yourself in your house whether you want to or not.Collection: Home
Be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, but be gracious if it kills you.Collection: Witty
Simplicity, suitability and proportion.Collection: Simplicity
Light, air and comfort - these three things I must always have in a room.Collection: Light
I believe in optimism & plenty of white paint.Collection: Believe
What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes with it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it- and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand.Collection: Giving
The cardinal virtue of all beauty is restraint.Collection: Design
There never has been a house so bad that it couldn't be made over into something worthwhile.Collection: House
It does not matter whether one paints a picture, writes a poem, or carves a statue - simplicity is the mark of a master-hand.Collection: Writing
It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.Collection: Happiness
A house should be a synthesis of comfort, practicality, and tradition.Collection: House
I can't paint. I can't write. I can't sing. But I can decorate and run a house, and light it, and heat it, and have it like a living thing.Collection: Running
I was born with the courage to live. Only those are unwise who have never dared to be fools.Collection: Fool
It is not chic to be too chic.Collection: Teenage
You will soon find that your joy in your home is growing, and that you have a source of happiness within yourself that you had not suspected.Collection: Home
Eating outdoors makes for good health and long life and good temper, everyone knows that.Collection: Long
Good dressing is largely a question of detail and accessories.Collection: Details
My business is to preach to you the beauty of suitability.Collection: Design
When one begins to think of oneself as growing old, one is already old.Collection: Thinking
I know of nothing more significant than the awakening of men and women throughout our country to the desire to improve their houses. Call it what you will - awakening, development, American Renaissance - it is a most startling and promising condition of affairs.Collection: Country
a woman of the world should always be the mistress of sorrow and not its servant. She may have a grief but never a grievance.Collection: Grief
don't make each room a different color in a small apartment or you'll make yourself nervous.Collection: Color
When I am no longer being copied, I shall know that I am a back number. ... the fear of being copied is often the characteristic of the meager imagination.Collection: Numbers
We cannot do better than to accept the standards of other times, and to adapt them to our uses.Collection: Design
the smallest part is worthy of the whole.Collection: Worthy
You can't take it with you. There are no pockets in a shroud.Collection: Design
[At first sight of the Acropolis:] It's beige! My color!Collection: Sight
I was not ugly. I might never be anything for men to lose their heads about, but I need never again be ugly. This knowledge was like a song within me. Suddenly it all came together. If you were healthy, fit, and well-dressed, you could be attractive.Collection: Song
I am going in now for interior decoration. By that I mean supplying objets d'art and giving advice regarding the decoration of their houses to wealthy persons who do not have the time, inclination, nor culture to do such work for themselves. It is nothing new. Women have done the same thing before.Collection: Art
I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint.Collection: Believe
No, I don't take soup. You can't build a meal on a lake.Collection: Food
I opened the doors and windows of America, and let the air and sunshine in.Collection: Sunshine
Never, under any circumstance, do I touch soup, as I do not believe in building a meal on a lake.Collection: Believe
This is the age of the apartment. Not only in the great cities, but in the smaller centers of civilization the apartment has come to stay. ... A decade ago the apartment was considered a sorry makeshift in America, though it has been successful abroad for more years than you would believe.Collection: Sorry
To conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one's taxes or to write according to the rule of grammar.Collection: Writing
No one chair should be isolated.Collection: Furniture