Quotes by "Thornton Wilder"

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

I not only bow to the inevitable, I am fortified by it.

A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference ... it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.

For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

We live in what is, but we find 1,000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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

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

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

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

The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I knew that I was mortal; and now I regard those years as wasted, as unproductive, in which I was not aware that my death was certain, nay, momently possible. I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savor of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight.

It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

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

Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.

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

I’m awfully interested in how big things begin. You know how it is; you’re twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions. . . then whissh! you’re seventy. You’ve been a lawyer for fifty years and that white-haired lady by your side has eaten over 50,000 meals with you. How do such things begin?

Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was 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.

Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.

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.