Thornton Wilder Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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

Thornton Wilder
The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.

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
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
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
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
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
Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married.

Thornton Wilder
Ashley had no competitive sense and no need for money, but he took great interest in the play of numbers. He drew up charts analyzing the elements of probability in the various games. He had a memory for numbers and symbols.

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

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

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

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

Thornton Wilder
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

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
Such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, sincerity became less necessary.

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
[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
Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

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

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

Thornton Wilder
I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

Thornton Wilder