Top 160 Thornton Wilder Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple’s corridors; she does not know herself. ‘I can endure lies,’ she cries. ‘I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude.”

— Thornton Wilder

52. “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

53. “Guile is the shield and spear of the oppressed.”

— Thornton Wilder

54. “There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.”

— Thornton Wilder

55. “She had been through hard straits herself and assumed that persons of quality did not discuss them. Steel exists to support pressure.”

— Thornton Wilder

56. “The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one’s own errors impoverish and cripple one’s children? Such is the endless chain of the generations?”

— Thornton Wilder

57. “I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.”

— Thornton Wilder

58. “There’s nothing like mixing with woman to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.”

— Thornton Wilder

59. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

60. “Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.”

— Thornton Wilder

61. “The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

63. “Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

65. “Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer’s day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

— Thornton Wilder

66. “All excellence is equally difficult.”

— Thornton Wilder

67. “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 mess; I wish...”

— Thornton Wilder

68. “If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent.”

— Thornton Wilder

69. “I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.”

— Thornton Wilder

70. “How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you’d find swine? The world is a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?”

— Thornton Wilder

71. “People a thousand years from now – this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the 20th century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our living and in our dying.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

73. “Everybody’s talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

75. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

— Thornton Wilder

76. “People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.”

— Thornton Wilder

77. “He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer – a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.”

— Thornton Wilder

78. “The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem – new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

81. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

82. “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

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

— Thornton Wilder

84. “Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

86. “Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she’s a householder.”

— Thornton Wilder

87. “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

88. “In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.”

— Thornton Wilder

89. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

90. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

91. “I can’t look at everything hard enough!”

— Thornton Wilder

92. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

93. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

94. “We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes.”

— Thornton Wilder

95. “Everybody has a right to their own troubles.”

— Thornton Wilder

96. “How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

98. “The life of a village in the life of the stars.”

— Thornton Wilder

99. “I am not interested in the ephemeral – such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.”

— Thornton Wilder

100. “Each new child that’s born to the Antrobuses seems to them to be sufficient reason for the whole universe’s being set in motion; and each new child that dies seems to them to have been spared a whole world of sorrow, and what the end of it will be is still very much an open question.”

— Thornton Wilder