Thornton Wilder Quotes & Sayings

Henceforth letter-writing had to take the place of all the affection that could not be lived. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie. — Thornton Wilder

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth. — Thornton Wilder

I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie. — Thornton Wilder

I can't look at everything hard enough! — Thornton Wilder

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

The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error — Thornton Wilder

You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever.
I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense. — Thornton Wilder

I regard the theater 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. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage. — Thornton Wilder

In love's service, only the wounded soldier can serve. — Thornton Wilder

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

The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I knew that I was mortal; and now I regard those years as wasted, as unproductive, in which I was not aware that my death was certain, nay, momently possible. I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savor of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

Everybody should eavesdrop once in a while. There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head. — Thornton Wilder

Like all solitary persons he had invested friendship with a divine glamour: he imagined that the people he passed on the street, laughing together and embracing when they parted, the people who dined together with so many smiles, you will scarcely believe me, but he imagined that they were extracting from all that congeniality great store of satisfaction. — Thornton Wilder

There are the stars
doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk ... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest. — Thornton Wilder

Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody's thinking about you the whole time. — Thornton Wilder

The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men's. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders. — Thornton Wilder

You have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life — Thornton Wilder

Love is its own eternity. — Thornton Wilder

Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in. — Thornton Wilder

Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them. — Thornton Wilder

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so. — Thornton Wilder

I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it. — Thornton Wilder

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

For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation? — Thornton Wilder

Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder. — Thornton Wilder

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID! — Thornton Wilder

Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water. — Thornton Wilder

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value. — Thornton Wilder

She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. "How queerly they dress!" we cry. "How queerly they dress! — Thornton Wilder

Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again. — Thornton Wilder

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday. — Thornton Wilder

Everybody has a right to their own troubles. — Thornton Wilder

On Friday noon, July twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. — Thornton Wilder

The best thing about animals is they don't talk much — Thornton Wilder

When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much. — Thornton Wilder

There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation. — Thornton Wilder

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Thornton Wilder

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words. — Thornton Wilder

Guile is the shield and spear of the oppressed. — Thornton Wilder

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

As an anonymous letter has recently informed me, a dictatorship is a powerful incitement to the composition of anonymous letters. I have never known a time when so many were in circulation. They are continually arriving at my door. Inspired by passion and enjoying the irresponsibility of their orphaned condition, they nevertheless have one great advantage over legitimate correspondence: they expose their ideas to their ultimate conclusion; they empty the sack. — Thornton Wilder

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

He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer
a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon. — Thornton Wilder

Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech. — Thornton Wilder

Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger. — Thornton Wilder

[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires. — Thornton Wilder

It is only dogs that never bite their masters. — Thornton Wilder

Emily: But just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're all happy. Let's really look at one another... I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal. — Thornton Wilder

Heaven's my destination. — Thornton Wilder

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

The past and the future are always present within us. — Thornton Wilder

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

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow. — Thornton Wilder

The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and ( ... ) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

The silence of the three of them had made a little kernel of sense in a world of boasting, self-excuse and rhetoric. — Thornton Wilder

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

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. — Thornton Wilder

A play visibly represents pure existing. — Thornton Wilder

People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome. — Thornton Wilder

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests. — Thornton Wilder

Dinosaur/Mammoth: "It's cold. — Thornton Wilder

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent. — Thornton Wilder

Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences. — Thornton Wilder

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

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations. — Thornton Wilder

All excellence is equally difficult. — Thornton Wilder

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

We all know more than we know we know. — Thornton Wilder

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. — Thornton Wilder

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

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good — Thornton Wilder

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

all the sacristies in town: they trimmed all the cloister hedges; they polished every possible crucifix; they — Thornton Wilder

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

Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense. — Thornton Wilder

Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will. — Thornton Wilder

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

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide. — Thornton Wilder

Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island. — Thornton Wilder