Thornton Wilder Quotations

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

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

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

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.

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

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

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

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

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

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

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

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

Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.

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

When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.

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

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

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

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.

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.

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

Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.

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.

I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.

Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

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

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.

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy the ice cream while it's on your plate

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

The planting of trees in the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

Many plays-certainly mine-are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

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

Yes. Now you know. Now you know. 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 if 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.

The tiny tealeaf of consciousness spreads its bittersweet smoke through the sea of the primitive mind. Law is invented, then morality, then love, then forgiveness. Thousands and thousands of ideas, knit together over time, each one less practical and more ornamental than the last, all stretched taut above the wandering, wondering heads like a little pavilion; a temporary shelter for the human project.

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: ''Behold! These things are.'' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: ''This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.''

And we ourselves shall be loved for a while 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,

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.

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.

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. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

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

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

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.

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.

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while 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.

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.

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

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.

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?

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

All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. -stage manager, in the play OUR TOWN

Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.

All excellence is equally difficult.

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

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.

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.

Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.

I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?

But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.

EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.

[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

That’s what it was like 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. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN

An incinerator is a writer's best friend.

Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.

A play visibly represents pure existing.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

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.

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

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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.

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

For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

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

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. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

What is essential does not die but clarifies.

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.

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

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.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

true influence over another comes not from a moments eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime's thoughts stored up in the eyes...the secret smile in the eyes of a friend

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.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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