Thornton Wilder Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

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
Most of the people in the world are fools.... But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not — a fool among fools or a fool alone.

Thornton Wilder
I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.... Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?... I'm ready to go back... I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.

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

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

Thornton Wilder
But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God,—that's what it said on the envelope.

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

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

Thornton Wilder
Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

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

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

Thornton Wilder
George Brush is my name America's my nation Luddington's my dwelling place And Heaven's my destination.

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

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

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

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

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
Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city.

Thornton Wilder
A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.

Thornton Wilder
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.

Thornton Wilder
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools, and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

Thornton Wilder
The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous... and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.

Thornton Wilder
Money should circulate like rainwater … setting up a little business here and furnishing a good time there.

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

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

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
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