Top 148 Quotes & Sayings by Thornton Wilder - Page 3

Heaven's my destination.

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

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.

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

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

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.

[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.

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

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.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.

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

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 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.

The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.

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.

I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.

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

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

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

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

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

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!

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

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.