Thornton Wilder Quotes

Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.

All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

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

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

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

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

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

I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them--it was that promise.

Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.

A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.

Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.

I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.

Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. -stage manager, in the play OUR TOWN

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.

The best thing about animals is they don't talk much.

Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

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.

There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.

Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.