Quote

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.

Thornton Wilder

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Faculty
Choice
Birth
Choose
Choices
Death
May
Mind
Sovereign

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Thornton Wilder
Image
When you're at war, you think about a better life when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
Thornton Wilder
Image
All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
Thornton Wilder
Image
There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder