Wilder Thornton Quotes & Sayings

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

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness. — Thornton Wilder

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

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise. — Thornton Wilder

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

Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough. — Thornton Wilder

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

I can't look at everything hard enough! — 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

A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure. — 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

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

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

Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. — Thornton Wilder

If a man has no vices, he's in great danger of making vices out of his virtues, and there's a spectacle. We've all seen them: men who were monsters of philanthropy and women who were dragons of purity ... No, no - nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modesly around it. — Thornton Wilder

In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington — 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

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

He gazed for an hour upon the great clouds of pearl that hang forever upon the horizon of that sea, and extracted from their beauty a resignation that he did not permit his reason to examine. The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed. — 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

But while they continued staring into one another's face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse. — Thornton Wilder

What is essential does not die but clarifies. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

Does anybody realize what life is
while they're living it- every, every minute? — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

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

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

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude. — 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

Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity — Thornton Wilder

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. — Thornton Wilder

There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

Once in a thousand times, it's interesting. — Thornton Wilder

Spiders draw just enough silk out of their bowels to catch those half-dozen flies they need to feed themselves and their loved ones; but the rich make silk and silk and silk. Nothing can stop them. Their houses are stuffed with it. Their banks are stuffed with it, and it's not out of their bowels they make it, but out of the bowels and lungs and eyeballs of others. — Thornton Wilder

The future is the most expensive luxury in the world. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day. — 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

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

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

An incinerator is a writer's best friend. — Thornton Wilder

Dissipated men need one trustworthy friend. — Thornton Wilder

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

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs. — 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

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

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

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

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

Am I sure that there is no mind behind our existence and no mystery anywhere in the universe? I think I am. What joy, what relief there would be, if we could declare so with complete conviction. If that were so I could wish to live for ever. How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own rituals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives. — 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

He respected the slight nervous shadow that crossed her face when he came too near her. But there arose out of this denial itself the perfume of a tenderness, that ghost of passion which, in the most unexpected relationship, can make even a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious dream. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

I have long noticed that people who talk to those closest to them only about what they eat, what they wear, the money they make, the trip they will or will not take next week - such people are of two sorts. They either have no inner life, or their inner life is painful to them, is beset with regret or fear. — Thornton Wilder

We all have time to expend on what is essential to our nature. — 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

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

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 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

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

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed. — Thornton Wilder

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 — Thornton Wilder

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

Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it. — Thornton Wilder

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure. — Thornton Wilder

A play visibly represents pure existing. — 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

Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. "I am alone, alone, alone," he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said, "We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn't for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You'll be surprised at the way time passes. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

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

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

The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. — Thornton Wilder

I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility. — 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

We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

Heaven's my destination. — Thornton Wilder