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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

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
Conditions
Purpose
Success
Providence
Condition
Eternal

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.
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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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
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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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
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.
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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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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.
Thornton Wilder
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Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton Wilder
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When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
Thornton Wilder
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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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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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A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
Thornton Wilder
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Thornton Wilder
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
Thornton Wilder
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
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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?
Thornton Wilder
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
Thornton Wilder