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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.

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
Attentive
Silent
Quiet
Become
Self
Effacing
Confidences
Recipients

More quotes by 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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Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
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.
Thornton Wilder
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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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On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
Thornton Wilder
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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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.
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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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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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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 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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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Thornton Wilder
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Heaven's my destination.
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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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Thornton Wilder