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If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

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
Spectacle
Virtues
Vices
Danger
Virtue
Making
Great
Men

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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
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
Thornton Wilder
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
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That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
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Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
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you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life
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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
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
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Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
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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
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I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.
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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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
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It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
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
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
Thornton Wilder
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Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
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