Thornton Wilder: Trending quotes (page 2)

“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good”

“Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.”

“Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.”

“Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”

“Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.”

“Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners — your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards — who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.”

“Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.”

“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.”

“A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.”

“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.”

“I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.”

“The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.”

“I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. 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 — whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.”

“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; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are."”

“Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.”

“Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.”

“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.”

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

“Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.”