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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

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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
Failure
Console
Humor
Wider
Sense
Shortcomings
Action
Reference
Others
Judges
Pardon
Actions
Pardons
Judging
Consoles

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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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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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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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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
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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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I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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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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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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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 test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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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.
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