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the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
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
Vessel
Bitter
Style
Purport
Literature
Notation
Whole
Faintly
Heart
Contemptible
World
Recommended
Liquid
More quotes by Thornton Wilder
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
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
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
I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
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
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
Thornton Wilder
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.
Thornton Wilder
[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
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
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Thornton Wilder
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
Thornton Wilder
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
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
I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
Thornton Wilder
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Thornton Wilder
A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
Thornton Wilder
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
Thornton Wilder
