Thornton Wilder Quotes

138 quotes in 1577 categories

• Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
• The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it say to yourself, Oh, now I've got myself into an awful…
• Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
• There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
• If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
• Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
• 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…
• The best thing about animals is they don't talk much.
• 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.
• What is essential does not die but clarifies.
• Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed…
• Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
• When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.
• Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
• For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
• Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
• Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
• We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
• 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…
• The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.

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