Thornton Wilder
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.Collection: Great
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.Collection: Alone
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.Collection: Wisdom
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.Collection: Pet
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Good
Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.Collection: Marriage
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.Collection: Courage
Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Home
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.Collection: Beauty
The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.Collection: Best
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
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.
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
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.
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.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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.
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
A play visibly represents pure existing.
If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.
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.
Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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.
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.'
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.
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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.
An incinerator is a writer's best friend.
In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.
Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Gratitude
But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.Collection: Memories
If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be goodCollection: Writing
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.Collection: Marriage
A purpose is the eternal condition of success.Collection: Purpose
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.Collection: Art
I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. 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 - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.Collection: Life
The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.Collection: Luxury
The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.Collection: Death
Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.Collection: Adventure
Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.Collection: Life