Thornton Wilder

“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.”

“All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?”

“The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”

“Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.”

“I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps”

“Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.”

“It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.”

“A play visibly represents pure existing.”

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

“The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.”

“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.”

“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”

“The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and (...) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty.”

“Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity”

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

“We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.”