Quote

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

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
Jests
Children
Inflict
Terrifying
Reserves
Scary
Upon
Nature
Right

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
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
That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
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
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
Image
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
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
Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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
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
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