Top 160 Thornton Wilder Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

3. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

4. “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?”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

6. “Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.”

— Thornton Wilder

7. “If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.”

— Thornton Wilder

8. “A purpose is the eternal condition of success.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

10. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

11. “It is in this sense that responsibility is liberty; the more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.”

— Thornton Wilder

12. “The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

14. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

15. “Heaven’s my destination.”

— Thornton Wilder

16. “Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse.”

— Thornton Wilder

17. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

18. “You’ve got to love life to have life, and you’ve got to have life to love life.”

— Thornton Wilder

19. “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

24. “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

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

— Thornton Wilder

26. “If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there’s a spectacle.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

28. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

29. “Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.”

— Thornton Wilder

30. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

31. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

32. “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

33. “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”

— Thornton Wilder

34. “What is essential does not die but clarifies.”

— Thornton Wilder

35. “Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”

— Thornton Wilder

36. “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

37. “The best thing about animals is they don’t talk much.”

— Thornton Wilder

38. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

39. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

40. “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

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

— Thornton Wilder

42. “Once in a thousand times, it’s interesting.”

— Thornton Wilder

43. “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

44. “I regard the theater 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. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always “now” on the stage.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

46. “A sense of humor judges one’s actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

48. “The past and the future are always present within us.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

50. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder