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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
Great
Men
Spectacle
Virtues
Vices
Danger
Virtue
Making

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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Heaven's my destination.
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We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
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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.
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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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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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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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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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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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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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
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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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
Thornton Wilder
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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
Thornton Wilder
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
Thornton Wilder
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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