Thornton Wilder Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Thornton Wilder
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.

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

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
I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps

Thornton Wilder
Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same 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
I regard the theater as the greatest of all art-forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Thornton Wilder