Quote

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Thornton Wilder

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Orchestration
Platitudes
Literature

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Heaven's my destination.
Thornton Wilder
Image
For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
Image
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
Thornton Wilder
Image
[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder