Thornton Wilder
But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.Collection: Time
Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Night
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.Collection: Time
When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.Collection: Peace
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.Collection: Humor
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.Collection: Friday
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.Collection: Country
If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.Collection: Men
The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.Collection: Ideas
But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.Collection: Excellence
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.Collection: Country
The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Ephemeral
I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!Collection: Men
I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.Collection: Military
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.Collection: Giving
Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.Collection: Talking
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.Collection: Reading
There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.Collection: Men
She had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed though a long servitude, though its own self-hatred, though mockery, though great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.Collection: Loyalty
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.Collection: Public Good
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.Collection: Leadership
Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.Collection: Play
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.Collection: Real
Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worseCollection: Mind
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 reshapeCollection: Funny
I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.Collection: Lying
People a thousand years from now - this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the 20th century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our living and in our dying.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Doctors
I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.Collection: Race
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's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?Collection: Hate
What is essential does not die but clarifies.Collection: Healing
The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.Collection: Problem
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.Collection: Bullying
There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Character
Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Years
A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.Collection: Lying
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.Collection: Earth