Thornton Wilder Quotes - Page 5

Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.

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

Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.

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

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape

I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.

People a thousand years from now - this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the 20th century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our living and in our dying.

One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.

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

How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.

What is essential does not die but clarifies.

There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation.

Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.

The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.

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.'

The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.