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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
Funny
Fools
Great
Insane
World
Nine
People
Fool
Danger
Percent
Contagion
Rest
Ninety
Society
Insanity

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Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
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On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
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When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
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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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The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
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Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
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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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Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
Thornton Wilder
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
Thornton Wilder
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Thornton Wilder
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Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
Thornton Wilder
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We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
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Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
Thornton Wilder
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
Thornton Wilder