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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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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Public
Good
Love
Administer
Endowed
Trained
Leadership

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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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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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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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.
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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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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?
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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.
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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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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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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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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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Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
Thornton Wilder
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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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He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
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That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
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