Top 148 Quotes & Sayings by Thornton Wilder

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A play visibly represents pure existing.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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.

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.

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

An incinerator is a writer's best friend.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I regard the theatre 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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