Top 100 Thornton Wilder Quotes
#1. It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy's and girl's imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of imagination.
#2. Heaven's my destination.
#3. I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
#4. Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
#5. My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate.
#6. An incinerator is a writer's best friend.
#7. An American is insubmissive, lonely, self-educated, and polite.
#8. The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.
#9. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
#10. I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
#11. Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
#12. There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation.
#13. The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth ... and the ambitions they had ... and the things they suffered ... and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away.
#14. A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.
#15. The most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.
#16. In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington
#17. One can go on saying for years that one doesn't listen to gossip, that the absent cannot defend themselves from slander, etc., etc.; but, after all, isn't the provocation of so much gossip an offense in itself?
#18. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
#19. If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.
#20. There are few pleasures equal to that of imparting to a voracious learner the knowledge that one has grown old and weary in acquiring.
#21. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
#22. and most profoundly personal philosophical inquiry that we can undertake. It is the question that defines us as human beings. The novel begins precisely at noon on July 20,
#23. EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it ... every, every minute?"
STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe ... they do some.
#24. It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the person others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say thou slave.
#25. A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
#26. Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
#27. There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.
#28. Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.
#29. Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.
#30. The marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she is a householder.
#31. A living is made, Mr Kemper, by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year.Yes, sir! And a million ismade by producing something that everybody needs every day.You artists produce something that nobody needs at any time.
#32. If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
#33. All excellence is equally difficult.
#34. Guile is the shield and spear of the oppressed.
#35. I am not interested in the ephemeral - such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.
#36. On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.
#37. I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
#38. Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.
#39. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world is a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
#40. And at once he sacrificed everything to it, if it can be said we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess.
#41. It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
#42. Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.
#43. Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song.
#44. The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
#45. In love's service, only the wounded soldier can serve.
#46. The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
#47. When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
#48. Each new child that's born to the Antrobuses seems to them to be sufficient reason for the whole universe's being set in motion; and each new child that dies seems to them to have been spared a whole world of sorrow, and what the end of it will be is still very much an open question.
#49. I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.
#50. Once in a thousand times, it's interesting.
#51. It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.
#52. Everybody has a right to their own troubles.
#53. There's nothing like mixing with woman to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
#54. The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
#55. Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
#56. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living.
#57. Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.
#58. There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude
#59. A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
#60. Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
#61. Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
#62. Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.
#63. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
#64. Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
#65. One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.
#66. The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.
#67. The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
#68. The past and the future are always present within us.
#69. I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
#70. all the sacristies in town: they trimmed all the cloister hedges; they polished every possible crucifix; they
#71. As Plato, the dangerous beguiler, said: the best philosophers in the world are boys with their beards new on their chins; I am a boy again.
#72. I think that it can be assumed that no adults are ever really 'shocked' - that being shocked is always a pose.
#73. Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.
#74. On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
#75. Does anybody realize what life is
while they're living it- every, every minute?
#76. I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it.
#77. Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.
#78. Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
#79. All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love
I scarcely dare say it
but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?
#80. Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
#81. Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
#82. She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.
#83. So - people a thousand years from now ... This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.
#84. True influence over another comes not from a moments eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime's thoughts stored up in the eyes ... the secret smile in the eyes of a friend
#85. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.
#86. The silence of the three of them had made a little kernel of sense in a world of boasting, self-excuse and rhetoric.
#87. Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.
#88. I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
#89. People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.
#90. There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.
#91. Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.
#92. I think we're all bad judges of what goes on in other people's minds about God, Mr. Smith. It's a bad thing to force a God on a man who doesn't want one. It's worse to stand in the way of a man who wants one badly.
#93. Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.
#94. The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
#95. But while they continued staring into one another's face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.
#96. I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
#97. The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'
#98. The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
#99. Love is its own eternity.
#100. A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.
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