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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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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Children
Purer
Planting
Centered
Trees
Tree
Least
Faith
Self
Procreation

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One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.
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A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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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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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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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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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.
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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 stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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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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A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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