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Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

Thornton Wilder

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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Society
Insanity
Funny
Fools
Great
Insane
World
Nine
People
Fool
Danger
Percent
Contagion
Rest
Ninety

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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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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
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But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
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A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.
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The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.
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I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
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Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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