Thornton Wilder quotes

[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Dream #Art #Routine

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Inspirational #Life #Inspiring

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

#Art #Secret #Desire

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

#Memories #Land #Bridges

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
-- Thornton Wilder

#Writing #Impress #Be Good

There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Night #Remember #Equal

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Death #Gratitude #Grief

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Inspirational #Hope #Motivation

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.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Marriage #Growing Up #Children

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

#Happiness #Laughter #Acceptance

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

#Travel #Adventure #Home

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

#Gratitude #Grief #Reality

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

#Believe #Theatre #Events

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?
-- Thornton Wilder

#Crazy #Trying #Want

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Passion #Love Is #Energy

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

#Time #Moving #Eye

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

#Beautiful #Two #Perfect

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

#Self #Hatred #Needs

Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Funny #People #Insanity

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
-- Thornton Wilder

#Stars #Years #Play

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

#Time #Fool #There Comes A Time

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
-- Thornton Wilder

#Realizing #Humans

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Waiting #World #Masterpiece

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Love #Islands #Poetic

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Faith #Hope #Fear

Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
-- Thornton Wilder

#World #Razors #Good Things

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

#Inspirational #Success #Purpose

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

#Childhood #Atheism #Unhappy

A play visibly represents pure existing.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Play

The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Decision #Awareness #Freedom To Choose

Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Love #Heartbreak #Dog

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

#Happiness #Understanding #Alive

I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Positive Thinking #Thinking #Bows

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

#Adventure #Why Not #Life Is

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

#Summer #Boys #Sparrows

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Two #People #Natural

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
-- Thornton Wilder

#Coffee #Sleep #Sunflower

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

#Country #Travel #Want

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?
-- Thornton Wilder

#Earth #Wonderful #Realizing