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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

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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
Live
Strengthens
Great
Faculty
Way
Theater
Life
Thousand
Ways
Face
Faces
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More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
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There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
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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.
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Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
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A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
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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.
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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.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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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.
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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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But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
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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.
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The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.
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Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
Thornton Wilder
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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.
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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