Thornton Wilder Quotes - Page 4

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

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.

Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.

When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.

A living is made, Mr Kemper, by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year.Yes, sir! And a million ismade by producing something that everybody needs every day.You artists produce something that nobody needs at any time.

A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.

If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

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.

I am not interested in the ephemeral - such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.

I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.

Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!

Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.

She had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed though a long servitude, though its own self-hatred, though mockery, though great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

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.