Quote

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

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
Highest
Wants
Deepest
Bring
Creature
Alive
Misery
Understanding
Loves
Happiness
Save
Best
Gift
Whole
Creatures

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?
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
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
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
People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.
Thornton Wilder
Image
[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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
Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps
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