Quote

There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

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
Head
Show
Shows
Truth
Eavesdropping
Nothing
Honesty
Different
Outside
Like
World
Inside

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
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
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
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
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
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
Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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
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
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
Image
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
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
I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
Thornton Wilder
Image
That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder