Thornton Wilder Quotes

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

Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

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

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.

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.

Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.

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

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.

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

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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

A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.

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

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.

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

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

There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.

When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.

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.

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

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

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.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.

Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.

you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life

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

Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

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

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.

The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

What is essential does not die but clarifies.

The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.