Thornton Wilder Quotes

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

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.

Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

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.

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.

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse

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.

The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.

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.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.

Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.

Heaven's my destination.

Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

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.

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.

When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.

An incinerator is a writer's best friend.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.

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.

[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.

I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them--it was that promise.

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

There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.

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

Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

What is essential does not die but clarifies.

How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

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

A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.

She had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed though a long servitude, though its own self-hatred, though mockery, though great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

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

That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.

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