Be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, but be gracious if it kills you.
I am going to make everything around me beautiful – that will be my life.
The cardinal virtue of all beauty is restraint.
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.
There never has been a house so bad that it couldn’t be made over into something worthwhile.
When one begins to think of oneself as growing old, one is already old.
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.
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.
We cannot do better than to accept the standards of other times, and to adapt them to our uses.
You will express yourself in your house whether you want to or not.