Quotes from Thornton Wilder

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.

Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.

Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.

It is only dogs that never bite their masters.

It is in this sense that responsibility is liberty; the more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.

There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude

It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the person others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say "thou slave.

There are few pleasures equal to that of imparting to a voracious learner the knowledge that one has grown old and weary in acquiring.

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.

He respected the slight nervous shadow that crossed her face when he came too near her. But there arose out of this denial itself the perfume of a tenderness, that ghost of passion which, in the most unexpected relationship, can make even a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious dream.

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.

He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure. Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. Now was beginning that crazy loss of one's self, that neglect of everything but one's dramatic thoughts about the beloved, that feverish inner life all turning upon the [loved one].

I think that it can be assumed that no adults are ever really 'shocked' - that being shocked is always a pose.

Once in a thousand times, it's interesting.

Am I sure that there is no mind behind our existence and no mystery anywhere in the universe? I think I am. What joy, what relief there would be, if we could declare so with complete conviction. If that were so I could wish to live for ever. How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own rituals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives.

An American is insubmissive, lonely, self-educated, and polite.

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 of this earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love's service only wounded soldiers can serve.

She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.

Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.

Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.

Do human beings ever realize life while they live it ?-every, every minute?

In love's service, only the wounded soldier can serve.

Dinosaur/Mammoth: "It's cold.