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
Literature
Orchestration
Platitudes

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
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
Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
Image
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
What is essential does not die but clarifies.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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