Quote

A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

Thornton Wilder

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Condition
Eternal
Conditions
Purpose
Success
Providence

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
Thornton Wilder
Image
There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
What is essential does not die but clarifies.
Thornton Wilder
Image
People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
Image
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Heaven's my destination.
Thornton Wilder