Thornton Wilder Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

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
Whenever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

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
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
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

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
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
Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

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
[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
We ourselves shall be loved for awhile 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
Then there is technology, the excess of scientists who learn how to make things much faster than we can learn what to do with them.

Thornton Wilder
People a thousand years from now - this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the 20th century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our living and in our dying.

Thornton Wilder
People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.

Thornton Wilder
How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives.

Thornton Wilder