Thornton Wilder Quotes

He gazed for an hour upon the great clouds of pearl that hang forever upon the horizon of that sea, and extracted from their beauty a resignation that he did not permit his reason to examine. The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.

We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes.

Love is its own eternity.

EMILY:

Softly, more in wonder than in grief.

I can’t bear it. They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all, everything. — I can’t look at everything hard enough.

religions are merely the garments of faith — and very ill cut they often are,

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

Most of all, however, these observances attack and undermine the very spirit of life within the minds of men. They afford to our Romans, from the street sweepers to the consuls, a vague sense of confidence where no confidence is and at the same time a pervasive fear, a fear which neither arouses to action nor calls forth ingenuity, but which paralyzes. They remove from men's shoulders the unremitting obligation to create, moment by moment, their own Rome. They come to us sanctioned by the usage of our ancestors and breathing the security of our childhood; they flatter passivity and console inadequacy

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

Y'know Babylon once had two million people
in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney, same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.
So I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lind-bergh flight. See what I mean?
So people a thousand years from now this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

Does anybody realize what life is
while they're living it- every, every minute?

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 is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.

Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

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