Thornton Wilder Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Thornton Wilder on Wise Famous Quotes.
Contemplating Clodia I find scarcely a drop in my heart of that compassion which Epicurus enjoins us to extend toward the erring.
The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
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.
Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
I think that it can be assumed that no adults are ever really 'shocked' - that being shocked is always a pose.
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.
On Friday noon, July twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.
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.
There are few pleasures equal to that of imparting to a voracious learner the knowledge that one has grown old and weary in acquiring.
Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.
EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it ... every, every minute?"
STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe ... they do some.
STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe ... they do some.
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.
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
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.
But while they continued staring into one another's face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate.
Many who have dedicated their life to love, can tell us less about this subject than a child who lost his dog yesterday.
MRS. ANTROBUS: What, George? What have you lost? ANTROBUS: The most important thing of all: The desire to begin again, to start building.
When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.
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.
Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.
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.
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.
Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
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.
But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.
Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.
The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
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.
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.
The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living.
The silence of the three of them had made a little kernel of sense in a world of boasting, self-excuse and rhetoric.