Thornton Wilder Quotes

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

It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.

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

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.

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."

She had been through hard straits herself and assumed that persons of quality did not discuss them. Steel exists to support pressure.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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.

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?

The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living.

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse

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.

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.

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.

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