Quotes from Thornton Wilder

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

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

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

The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.

Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of a whole city.

If a man has no vices, he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

I think it's about adventure. 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...

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

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

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

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.

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.

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

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.

There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.

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

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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

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.

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.

A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference... it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.

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 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 pleasures they had… and the things they suffered… and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that's the way I put it—weaned away.

The whole world's at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn't fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.