99+ Thornton Wilder Quotes on Our Town, Life and Epitaph - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Thornton Wilder quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Thornton Wilder quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Thornton Wilder wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Our Town, Life and Epitaph

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.

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.

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.

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

Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

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

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.

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

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

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.

An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.

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.

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

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

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

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

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.

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

Art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.

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.’

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

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.

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

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

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.

And at once he sacrificed everything to it, if it can be said we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess.

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.

A play visibly represents pure existing.

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.

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

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 regard the theater 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. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always “now” on the stage.

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

How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives.

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 is a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

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

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.

I can’t look at everything hard enough!

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

So – people a thousand years from now... This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

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

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

Everybody has a right to their own troubles.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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.

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.

In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

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

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.

You’ve got to love life to have life, and you’ve got to have life to love life.

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