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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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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
World
Doubt
Hate
House
Swine
Happens
Rip
Doe
Foul
Find
Houses
Matter
Fronts
Like
Hell

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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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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.
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.
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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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you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
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Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
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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.
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A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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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.
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder