Words matter. These are the best Thornton Wilder Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The best thing about animals is that they don’t talk much.
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.
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
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.
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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.
Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she’s a householder.
There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
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.
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent.
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.
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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.’
Many plays – certainly mine – are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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.
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.
