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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.

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
Attached
Favors
Cease
Intelligence
Conditions

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
Thornton Wilder
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
Thornton Wilder
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
Thornton Wilder
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Thornton Wilder
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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
Thornton Wilder
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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.
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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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
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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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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
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Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
Thornton Wilder
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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
Thornton Wilder
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Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Thornton Wilder
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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