Elsie de Wolfe Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

A man may build and decorate a beautiful house, but it remains for a woman to make a home of it for him. 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.

Elsie de Wolfe
Eating outdoors makes for good health and long life and good temper, everyone knows that.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint, comfortable chairs with lights beside them, open fires on the hearth and flowers wherever they "belong," mirrors and sunshine in all rooms.

Elsie de Wolfe
When one begins to think of oneself as growing old, one is already old.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
Only those are unwise who have never dared to be fools.

Elsie de Wolfe
Don't make each room a different color in a small apartment or you'll make yourself nervous.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
It was a great holiness, a religion, as all great loves must be.

Elsie de Wolfe
Don't run away with the idea that it is easy to cook simply. It requires a long apprenticeship.

Elsie de Wolfe
We cannot do better than to accept the standards of other times, and to adapt them to our uses.

Elsie de Wolfe
Good dressing is largely a question of detail and accessories.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
It does not matter whether one paints a picture, writes a poem, or carves a statue, simplicity is the mark of a master-hand.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
You will express yourself in your house whether you want to or not.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
Light, air and comfort — these three things I must always have in a room.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
Never, under any circumstance, do I touch soup, as I do not believe in building a meal on a lake.

Elsie de Wolfe
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.

Elsie de Wolfe
What a joyous thing is color! How influenced we all are by it, even if we are unconscious of how our sense of restfulness has been brought about.

Elsie de Wolfe
Be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, but be gracious if it kills you.

Elsie de Wolfe