Thornton Wilder Quotes

If a man has no vices he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues and there's a spectacle.
Thornton Wilder
Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar and the drunkard who's the benefactor of a whole city.
Thornton Wilder
Pride avarice and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.
Thornton Wilder
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
Thornton Wilder
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just to enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
Thornton Wilder
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just to enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
Thornton Wilder
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
We live in what is but we find 1 000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.
Thornton Wilder
Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference ... it pardons shortcomings it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.
Thornton Wilder
That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
Thornton Wilder
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation.
Thornton Wilder
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
Many plays certainly mine are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Thornton Wilder
I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
Thornton Wilder
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
The marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she is a householder.
Thornton Wilder
[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.
Thornton Wilder
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?
Thornton Wilder
You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
Thornton Wilder
But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.
Thornton Wilder
Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.
Thornton Wilder
The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men's. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.
Thornton Wilder
And at once he sacrificed everything to it, if it can be said we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess.
Thornton Wilder
She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. “How queerly they dress!” we cry. “How queerly they dress!
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
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.
Thornton Wilder
Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song.
Thornton Wilder
Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!...I can't. I can't go on.It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye 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 are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some.Emily: I'm ready to go back.
Thornton Wilder
The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day's routine to them.
Thornton Wilder
It is only dogs that never bite their masters.
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
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
Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity
Thornton Wilder
But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
So - people a thousand years from now...This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.
Thornton Wilder
The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error
Thornton Wilder
She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.
Thornton Wilder
This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that 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 through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through 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.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?
Thornton Wilder
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
the condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
Thornton Wilder
The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and (...) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty.
Thornton Wilder
I can't look at everything hard enough!
Thornton Wilder
I can't look at everything hard enough!
Thornton Wilder
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 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.
Thornton Wilder
People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.
Thornton Wilder
Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.
Thornton Wilder