110+ Thornton Wilder Quotes On Innovative, Artistic And Quirky

Thornton Wilder was an American playwright and novelist from Madison, Wisconsin. He is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, as well as his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder was a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Thornton Wilder on life, innovative, artistic.

Top 10 Thornton Wilder Quotes

1. My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
2. I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
3. We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
4. There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
5. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
6. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
7. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?
8. Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
9. Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
10. Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

Thornton Wilder Short Quotes

• The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
• Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
• Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
• I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
• Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.
• I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
• Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
• Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
• A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
• The best thing about animals is they don't talk much.

Thornton Wilder Quotes About Life

EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some. — Thornton Wilder

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

But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone. — Thornton Wilder

Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough. — Thornton Wilder

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome. — Thornton Wilder

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

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it. — Thornton Wilder

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations. — Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder Quotes About Truth

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

Thornton Wilder Quotes About Children

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

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

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder Quotes About Love

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody's thinking about you the whole time. — Thornton Wilder

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 theremay never be two that love one another equally well. — Thornton Wilder

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away. — Thornton Wilder

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

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living. — Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder Quotes About Marriage

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

The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so. — Thornton Wilder

Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder. — Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. — Thornton Wilder

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow. — Thornton Wilder

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

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please? — Thornton Wilder

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

We live in what is, but we find 1,000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it. — Thornton Wilder

[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself. — Thornton Wilder

true influence over another comes not from a moments eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime's thoughts stored up in the eyes...the secret smile in the eyes of a friend — Thornton Wilder

the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water. — Thornton Wilder

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners -- your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards -- who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute. — Thornton Wilder

For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative? — Thornton Wilder

Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them. — Thornton Wilder

[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

An incinerator is a writer's best friend. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night. — Thornton Wilder

What is essential does not die but clarifies. — Thornton Wilder

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

I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps — Thornton Wilder

you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life — Thornton Wilder

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse — Thornton Wilder

The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, 'Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.' And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

It's when you're safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home. — Thornton Wilder

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know. — Thornton Wilder

The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much. — Thornton Wilder

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

Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them. — Thornton Wilder

All excellence is equally difficult. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it. — Thornton Wilder

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... — Thornton Wilder

There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest. — Thornton Wilder

You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense. — Thornton Wilder

Life Lessons by Thornton Wilder

1. Thornton Wilder teaches us to appreciate the small moments in life and to be mindful of the beauty of everyday life.
2. He also encourages us to embrace our individuality and to be proud of who we are, no matter what others may think.
3. Finally, Wilder reminds us to be kind to others and to always strive to be the best version of ourselves.