"Life is an unbroken succession of false situations."
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Quote collection
Thornton Wilder quotes (page 6 of 7)
139 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life"
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"Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other."
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"But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary."
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"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 things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away."
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"Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will."
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"You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense."
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"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."
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"[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires."
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"The future is the most expensive luxury in the world."
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"There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest."
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"How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives."
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"Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan."
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"What is essential does not die but clarifies."
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"I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility."
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"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."
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"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."
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"There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation."
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"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."
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"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."
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