Thornton Wilder

American - Novelist April 17, 1897 - December 7, 1975

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.
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

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
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

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

A play visibly represents pure existing.
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

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

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
Thornton Wilder

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Thornton Wilder

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

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

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

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

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

Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
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