Thornton Wilder Quotes

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

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Great, Rest, People, Fool, Danger

• 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.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Birth, Choose, Mind

• Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she’s a householder.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Think, Make, Marriage

• 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.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Winning, Exploration, Way, Language

• The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Decisions

  Tags in Forced, More, Freedom, Choose

• Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Week, Beginning, Man

• For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Seem, Human

• The best thing about animals is that they don’t talk much.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Talk, Thing

• 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.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Success

  Tags in Condition, Good, Providence, Purpose, Something

• 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.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in God

  Tags in Misery, Want, Understanding, Bring

• Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Lifetime, Yesterday, Tell

• 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

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Safety, Hom, Adventure, Wishes

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

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Confidence

  Tags in Silent

• There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Different, World, Head, Like

• 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.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Gift

  Tags in Exceptional, Except, Childhood, Unhappy

• It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Beauty

  Tags in World, Evil, Necessary

• Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Great, Every, Seek, Moment, Reading

• 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.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time, Appearance, Eye, Rather

• Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Children, Nature

  Tags in Most

• 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.’

  Thornton Wilder

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Theatre, Action, Learned, Things, Moral

Thornton Wilder (49)

Birth:	17th April, 1897
Death:	7th December, 1975
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Playwriter

Related Authors

• Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
• Paula Fox
• John Marsden
• George Packer
• Anaïs Nin
• Philippa Gregory
• Catherine Aird
• Wilbur Smith
• Pearl Cleage
• William Wells Brown

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 17th December

Births

• 1915 - Robert A. Dahl
• 1908 - Willard Libby
• 1938 - Peter Snell
• 1908 - Sylvia Ashton Warner
• 1796 - Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Deaths

• 1830 - Simon Bolivar
• 2004 - Tom Wesselmann
• 2008 - Sammy Baugh
• 1833 - Kaspar Hauser
• 1964 - Victor Francis Hess