The Literary House

Here are some house and home quotes that I enjoy. Do you have a favorite house quote? How about houses from novels—what houses stand out as memorable from your favorite books? I’d love to hear about them. Have they influenced your sense of “home?” Please share!

“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There ought to be a room in every house to swear in”
Mark Twain

“A house is a home when it shelters the body and comforts the soul.”
Phillip Moffitt

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
Eliel Saarinen

“When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home”
Thornton Wilder

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
George Moore

“Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“My precept to all who build is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house to the owner.”
Cicero

“Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them.”
Victor Hugo

“A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.”
May Sarton

“I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.”
Jane Smiley

“Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life.”
Josiah Gilbert Holland (used pseudonym Timothy Titcomb)

“I value this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent can bestow.”
Washington Irving

“The first indication of domestic happiness is the love of one's home.”
Francois Dominique Reynaud de comte de Montlosier (Francis Montlosier)

Photo courtesy of Alisa Windsor at coffeestainedpages