Thornton Wilder Quotes

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

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.

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.

The past and the future are always present within us.

A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery … He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift…. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

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?

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.

Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity

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 may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.

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.

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

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

the condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.

Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to do.