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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.

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

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
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A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.
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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
Thornton Wilder
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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
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
Thornton Wilder
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I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
Thornton Wilder
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
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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
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There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.
Thornton Wilder
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Thornton Wilder
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Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
Thornton Wilder
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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Thornton Wilder
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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
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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