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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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But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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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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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.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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Heaven's my destination.
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We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
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Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
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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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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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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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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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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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One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.
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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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