Top 160 Thornton Wilder Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

103. “Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

105. “I have long noticed that people who talk to those closest to them only about what they eat, what they wear, the money they make, the trip they will or will not take next week – such people are of two sorts. They either have no inner life, or their inner life is painful to them, is beset with regret or fear.”

— Thornton Wilder

106. “Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.”

— Thornton Wilder

107. “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

108. “There are few pleasures equal to that of imparting to a voracious learner the knowledge that one has grown old and weary in acquiring.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

110. “As an anonymous letter has recently informed me, a dictatorship is a powerful incitement to the composition of anonymous letters. I have never known a time when so many were in circulation. They are continually arriving at my door. Inspired by passion and enjoying the irresponsibility of their orphaned condition, they nevertheless have one great advantage over legitimate correspondence: they expose their ideas to their ultimate conclusion; they empty the sack.”

— Thornton Wilder

111. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

112. “It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the person others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say “thou slave.”

— Thornton Wilder

113. “Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

115. “A play visibly represents pure existing.”

— Thornton Wilder

116. “One can go on saying for years that one doesn’t listen to gossip, that the absent cannot defend themselves from slander, etc., etc.; but, after all, isn’t the provocation of so much gossip an offense in itself?”

— Thornton Wilder

117. “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.’”

— Thornton Wilder

118. “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

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

— Thornton Wilder

120. “Contemplating Clodia I find scarcely a drop in my heart of that compassion which Epicurus enjoins us to extend toward the erring.”

— Thornton Wilder

121. “Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.”

— Thornton Wilder

122. “For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?”

— Thornton Wilder

123. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

124. “Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.”

— Thornton Wilder

125. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

126. “Henceforth letter-writing had to take the place of all the affection that could not be lived.”

— Thornton Wilder

127. “I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.”

— Thornton Wilder

128. “Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody’s thinking about you the whole time.”

— Thornton Wilder

129. “I’ll be scalded and tarred if a man can’t get a little welcome when he comes home. Well, Maggie, you old gunny-sack, how’s the broken down old weather hen? – Sabina, old fishbait, old skunkpot. – And the children, – how’ve the little smellers been?”

— Thornton Wilder

130. “I think we’re all bad judges of what goes on in other people’s minds about God, Mr. Smith. It’s a bad thing to force a God on a man who doesn’t want one. It’s worse to stand in the way of a man who wants one badly.”

— Thornton Wilder

131. “An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.”

— Thornton Wilder

132. “There are the stars – doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven’t settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain’s so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.”

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

134. “Spiders draw just enough silk out of their bowels to catch those half-dozen flies they need to feed themselves and their loved ones; but the rich make silk and silk and silk. Nothing can stop them. Their houses are stuffed with it. Their banks are stuffed with it, and it’s not out of their bowels they make it, but out of the bowels and lungs and eyeballs of others.”

— Thornton Wilder

135. “For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?”

— Thornton Wilder

136. “When you’re at war, you think about a better life; when you’re at peace you think about a more comfortable one.”

— Thornton Wilder

137. “The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.”

— Thornton Wilder

138. “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

139. “Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.”

— Thornton Wilder

140. “Tutti, tutti noi abbiamo fallito. Desideriamo tutti un castigo. Desideriamo tutti di farci carico di ogni tipo di penitenza, ma sai, figlia mia, che in amore -riesco a malapena a dirlo- ma in amore i nostri errori non sembrano durare molto a lungo”.”

— Thornton Wilder

141. “Camila had intended to be perfunctory and if possible impudent, but now she was struck for the first time with the dignity of the old woman. The mercer’s daughter could carry herself at times with all the distinction of the Montemayors and when she was drunk she wore the grandeur of Hecuba.”

— Thornton Wilder

142. “The silence of the three of them had made a little kernel of sense in a world of boasting, self-excuse and rhetoric.”

— Thornton Wilder

143. “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.”

— Thornton Wilder

144. “One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.”

— Thornton Wilder

145. “That’s the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don’t feel the need to be impatient any longer.”

— Thornton Wilder

146. “It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy’s and girl’s imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of imagination.”

— Thornton Wilder

147. “There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation.”

— Thornton Wilder

148. “Many plays – certainly mine – are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.”

— Thornton Wilder

149. “He respected the slight nervous shadow that crossed her face when he came too near her. But there arose out of this denial itself the perfume of a tenderness, that ghost of passion which, in the most unexpected relationship, can make even a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious dream.”

— Thornton Wilder

150. “Am I sure that there is no mind behind our existence and no mystery anywhere in the universe? I think I am. What joy, what relief there would be, if we could declare so with complete conviction. If that were so I could wish to live for ever. How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own rituals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives.”

— Thornton Wilder