Thornton Wilder Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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

Thornton Wilder
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate — that's my philosophy.

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

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
Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. 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 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
Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

Thornton Wilder
Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse.

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
Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.

Thornton Wilder
The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go,—doesn't it?

Thornton Wilder
Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

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

Thornton Wilder
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.

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

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

Thornton Wilder
I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that 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. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater.

Thornton Wilder
The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.

Thornton Wilder
Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives 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.

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
That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

Thornton Wilder
We were shaken into existence, like dice from a box.

Thornton Wilder
Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

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