Quote

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
World
Recommended
Liquid
Vessel
Bitter
Style
Purport
Literature
Notation
Whole
Faintly
Heart
Contemptible

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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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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.
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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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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.
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I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps
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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.
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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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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.
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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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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
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Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
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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.
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
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He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.
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