35 Quotes by Thornton Wilder
- The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
- My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
- Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
- Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
- 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.
- Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
- The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.
- 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.
- 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.'
- There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
- There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
- Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
- Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
- 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.
- Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.
- When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
- We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
- 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.
- Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
- An incinerator is a writer's best friend.
- Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
- Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
- For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
- Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
- 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.
- 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.
- Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
- If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.
- In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
- 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.
- It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
- Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
- Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
- A play visibly represents pure existing.
- I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
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