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

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Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
Thornton Wilder
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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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The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
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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.
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
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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
Thornton Wilder
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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
Thornton Wilder
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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
Thornton Wilder
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Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
Thornton Wilder
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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.
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder