Thornton Wilder Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
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In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
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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.
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Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
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A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
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There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
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Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.
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The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself "Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
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That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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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
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Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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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.
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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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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.
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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.
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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
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The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.
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