Top 100 Quotes About Thornton Wilder
#1. My major contribution to the format was to suggest that I be able to step out of the plot and speak directly to the audience, and then be able to go right back into the action. That was an original idea of mine; I know it was because I originally stole it from Thornton Wilder's play Our Town.
George Burns
#2. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." - Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Nancy Herkness
#3. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#5. Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
Thornton Wilder
#6. Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
Thornton Wilder
#8. Contemplating Clodia I find scarcely a drop in my heart of that compassion which Epicurus enjoins us to extend toward the erring.
Thornton Wilder
#9. Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Thornton Wilder
#10. I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
Thornton Wilder
#11. My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
#12. Second only to the master of us all, Clodia has become the most discussed person in Rome. Versus of unbounded obscenity are scribbled about her over the walls and pavements of all the baths and urinals in Rome.
Thornton Wilder
#13. The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day's routine to them.
Thornton Wilder
#15. An American is insubmissive, lonely, self-educated, and polite.
Thornton Wilder
#16. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#17. It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Thornton Wilder
#18. The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.
Thornton Wilder
#19. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Thornton Wilder
#22. The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.
Thornton Wilder
#23. I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
Thornton Wilder
#24. Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
Thornton Wilder
#25. Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
#26. People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
#27. The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape
Thornton Wilder
#28. There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation.
Thornton Wilder
#29. We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
#30. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#31. A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.
Thornton Wilder
#32. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#33. Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
Thornton Wilder
#35. 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?
Thornton Wilder
#36. Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
Thornton Wilder
#37. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
#40. There are few pleasures equal to that of imparting to a voracious learner the knowledge that one has grown old and weary in acquiring.
Thornton Wilder
#42. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
#43. 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,
Thornton Wilder
#44. EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it ... every, every minute?"
STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe ... they do some.
Thornton Wilder
#45. For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
Thornton Wilder
#46. Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
Thornton Wilder
#47. We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
Thornton Wilder
#48. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#49. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#50. Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them.
Thornton Wilder
#51. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#52. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton Wilder
#53. Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
#54. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#55. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#56. Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.
Thornton Wilder
#57. [Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.
Thornton Wilder
#58. MRS. ANTROBUS: What, George? What have you lost? ANTROBUS: The most important thing of all: The desire to begin again, to start building.
Thornton Wilder
#59. The marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she is a householder.
Thornton Wilder
#60. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#61. If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
Thornton Wilder
#62. I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
Thornton Wilder
#66. Camila had intended to be perfunctory and if possible impudent, but now she was struck for the first time with the dignity of the old woman. The mercer's daughter could carry herself at times with all the distinction of the Montemayors and when she was drunk she wore the grandeur of Hecuba.
Thornton Wilder
#67. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#68. You've got to love life to have life, and you've got to have life to love life.
Thornton Wilder
#69. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#70. I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
Thornton Wilder
#71. In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
Thornton Wilder
#72. Many who have dedicated their life to love, can tell us less about this subject than a child who lost his dog yesterday.
Thornton Wilder
#73. The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
Thornton Wilder
#74. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#75. 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?
Thornton Wilder
#76. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#77. For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
#78. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#79. Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.
Thornton Wilder
#81. I'll be scalded and tarred if a man can't get a little welcome when he comes home. Well, Maggie, you old gunny-sack, how's the broken down old weather hen? - Sabina, old fishbait, old skunkpot. - And the children, - how've the little smellers been?
Thornton Wilder
#82. And oh, Claudia, Claudilla, ask me to do something -something that I can do. Do not ask me to forget you or to be indifferent to you. Do not ask me to have no interest in how you pass your time. But if we are separated, set me a task, something that will be a daily link with you.
Thornton Wilder
#83. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#84. The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
Thornton Wilder
#85. Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse
Thornton Wilder
#86. Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
Thornton Wilder
#87. It's when you're safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
Thornton Wilder
#88. In love's service, only the wounded soldier can serve.
Thornton Wilder
#90. A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.
Thornton Wilder
#91. She talked that night of all those out in the dark (she was thinking of Esteban alone, she was thinking of Pepita alone) who had no one to turn to, for whom the world perhaps was more than difficult, without meaning.
Thornton Wilder
#93. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#94. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#95. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#96. On Friday noon, July twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.
Thornton Wilder
#97. 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.
Thornton Wilder
#99. 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.
Thornton Wilder
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