Quotes from Thornton Wilder

Tutti, tutti noi abbiamo fallito. Desideriamo tutti un castigo. Desideriamo tutti di farci carico di ogni tipo di penitenza, ma sai, figlia mia, che in amore -riesco a malapena a dirlo- ma in amore i nostri errori non sembrano durare molto a lungo".

ma presto moriremo e ogni ricordo di quei cinque lascerà la terra, e noi stessi saremo amati per qualche tempo ancora e poi dimenticati. Ma l'amore sarà bastato; e tutti gli impulsi dell'amore ritornano all'amore da cui sono venuti. Nemmeno i ricordi sono necessari all'amore. C'è una terra dei vivi e una terra dei morti, e il ponte è l'amore, la sola sopravvivenza, il solo significato".

religions are merely the garments of faith—and very ill cut they often are

But while they continued staring into one another's face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.

MRS. ANTROBUS: What, George? What have you lost? ANTROBUS: The most important thing of all: The desire to begin again, to start building.

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.

I have long noticed that people who talk to those closest to them only about what they eat, what they wear, the money they make, the trip they will or will not take next week—such people are of two sorts. They either have no inner life, or their inner life is painful to them, is beset with regret or fear.

The silence of the three of them had made a little kernel of sense in a world of boasting, self-excuse and rhetoric.

Second only to the master of us all, Clodia has become the most discussed person in Rome. Versus of unbounded obscenity are scribbled about her over the walls and pavements of all the baths and urinals in Rome.

Contemplating Clodia I find scarcely a drop in my heart of that compassion which Epicurus enjoins us to extend toward the erring.

One can go on saying for years that one doesn't listen to gossip, that the absent cannot defend themselves from slander, etc., etc.; but, after all, isn't the provocation of so much gossip an offense in itself?

She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. "How queerly they dress!" we cry. "How queerly they dress!

The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living.

E cu neputin?? ca pân? la urm? s? nu ajungi cum crede lumea c? eÅŸti.

I think we're all bad judges of what goes on in other people's minds about God, Mr. Smith. It's a bad thing to force a God on a man who doesn't want one. It's worse to stand in the way of a man who wants one badly.

And I, who claim to know so much more, isn't it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring? Some say that we will never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

She had been through hard straits herself and assumed that persons of quality did not discuss them. Steel exists to support pressure.

it is human nature which does not change, no matter the era or situation.

It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy's and girl's imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of imagination.

Most rájött arra a titokra, melybÅ'l sohase gyógyulunk meg, hogy még a legtökéletesebb szerelemben is egyikünk kevésbé mélyen szeret, mint másikunk. Mindketten egyformán jók lehetünk, egyformán tehetségesek és szépek is; de sohase lehet két ember, aki egyformán szereti egymást.

In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington

that many people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard about it.

Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There

The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one's own errors impoverish and cripple one's children? Such is the endless chain of the generations?